Rusty's Blog

Well, it’s time to have my calendar assembled and ready to ship out for family members. It’s not perfect, but it’s getting better.

The source file for generating the calendar takes a bit of work every year. In the output are several different varieties of events. The lunar calendar is maintained separately. Personally I think that should be true for a couple of other sets of data, but it doesn’t quite work that way.

Most of the content is of the variety , month, day, text. I’m not expecting most of that to change from year to year, but there are exceptions.

Holidays get an asterisk ‘*’ after the day. or at least before the text.

Next in complexity is stuff that is related to our trip around the sun, that doesn’t quite fit a month day format. Equinoxes, solstices and meteor showers end up being in the same format as ‘events’ but may change from year to year. For example the vernal equinox was on March 19 in 2009, and will be March 20 in 2010.

Then comes ‘national holidays.’ Not all are actually holidays for all people, but that’s not the worst of it. Holiday’s ‘Observed’ is either the Monday before or closest to a date, or the closest working day. When the 4th of July falls on a Sunday, it is ‘observed’ on the 5th. On a Saturday it is observed on the 3rd. Memorial day is observed on the last Monday of May, and so on.

Every year the Jewish holidays move around, because they are part of the Jewish calendar which is based mostly on the lunar month rather than a solar month. There are additional complications based on the fact that observance of most of them begins at sunset the previous day, which also affects when some of them get set. More on that later.

Worst though is the Christian calendar. The easy ones are Christmas, and All Saints Day. The fall on the same days of the same months every year. Next up come things like the Sundays of Advent.

Easter poses a bit of a problem though. If you grew up going to Sunday school, you probably recall that Christ was crucified on Friday because the Saturday of passover was considered holy by the Jewish faith, and they could not allow him to be hanging on the cross on that day. So Easter Sunday is axiomatically tied to Passover. The rule for deciding when Easter is, is The first Sunday after the first full moon after the first full day of spring. So if the vernal equinox is at 11 pm on the 19th of March, and the full moon is at 2 pm on the 21st, then Easter would be on the following Sunday. That could be as early as the 29th of March.

Based on that you would expect passover to be observed the same week. Right? Well, not really. Remember that the Jewish set holidays based on sunset rather than midnight. So if the vernal equinox is at 11 pm, which is after sunset, on the 19th, it is treated as if it happened on the 20th. So the first full day after the vernal equinox is not the 20th, but the 21st. If the full moon happens at 2 pm on the 21st, it is not the Passover moon, but the full moon before the passover moon. Passover does not start for another 29 days. So while I can calculate both events, the actual calculation will depend on different parameters, and as a result will end up pointing to different days or periods of time. Of course there are a number of events on the christian calendar that are directly related to when Easter is set. Palm Sunday, Ash Wednesday, Ascension day, etc.

I’ve also completely glossed over ‘where’ the time has to be compared for determining sunset, and midnight. The Vernal Equinox is at a specific UTC time, but may be posted to a calendar as a local time. For Christian calendars the comparison is likely to be against the local time for Rome which is UTC +1, vs. Jerusalem at UTC +2.

A minor addition is that in addition to the commonly recognized observance of Christmas and new years, there are also orthodox Christian observances which are not the same days as appear on the western calendar because they are based on the Julian calendar observances and not the Gregorian calendar dates.

There are potentially hundreds of additional calendars I could add. For example there are all of holidays recognized in India. I have not added the events in the Islamic calendar, or posted things like various Asian new year and other holidays important to the region. In theory there are over a hundred different country calendars with different holidays being designated. If someone wants to throw together and comment to the page a list of holidays or events that they think should be on a calendar, and would like a calendar created for them, feel free. Eexamples of the calendars that can be created are at http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/Calender2010/2010-Calendar_pub.pdf and http://www.beresourceful.net/~rusty/Calender2010/2010-Calendar_pub_p.pdf

As I stated in the begining, I may have a few of the items wrong. In any case, enjoy.

Paper Spam…

I got to my car last night and was disapointed to find that I had some fresh paper spam on my car. In this case it was a religious tract, which I find somewhat less offensive than Herbalife or varient MLM spam that I seem to get with entirely too much frequency.

While I do find it less offensive, it still violates my primary disagrement with the practice, and was agrivated in that this spam was laminated. (plasticised to improve wear life)

There was only one thing that this piece had going for it. Asside from it being a religious tract, it was also a 2005 wallet callendar.

I will carry it in my wallet, as I do occasionally need to check a callendar. I don’t expect it to change my christian outlook on life.

Even with the fact that I will make use of it, I do not approve of the practice. At a very minimum well over 90% of paper spam on a car in a parking lot will be dropped on the parking lot itself by the car owner. Unless (and even most of the times when) the owner of the parking lot sweeps it nightly, most of this material is going to be blown or rained into gutters, storm sewers and the surounding environment. (To the immeadiate East of the lot my car was in is a rather large pond that gease summer in and rais their young) The dies, bleaches, inks plastics (including toner) are therefore going to be seaping into the environment, some of which is not environmentally friendly.

I think that should someone be caught placing paper flyers on cars, they should be charged with littering, with an incidence count of one charge per item placed per car. (100 cars, 100 counts)

That’s just my opinion however.

-Rusty