Had some clouds and even some rain a while back.

But then got to do some testing.  Whatever time it was, my code was predicting that the afternoon sun was going to be at around 52 degrees elevation, or maybe it was 53, at whatever azimuth.  So I propped up a 2x4 against the fence, and aligned it so that there was as little of a shadow as possible cast on the ground, allowing me to use this ancient inclinometer to actually measure the solar elevation, for whatever time of day it was.

Yeah.  O.K., for now.  But need to do more work on the actual elliptic plots, and all of that equation of time stuff, as if according to Kepler.  Even if I am not planning any actual trip to the moon anytime soon, with these calculations.

Then I decided to go ahead and do a little more work on the idea of making an actual, or virtual, teapot with an infinite number of virtual fortune cookies.  So, I fired up an instance of Mega-Hal, and tried to get it onto the topic, a topic that is, that it has no preparation for.  Of course, if you have been a Linux user long enough, you know that there are plenty of versions of "Fortune" in almost any Linux Distro, so coming up with things that a talking teapot might want to talk about, according to the time of day, and determined to the exact second, by whatever, means of course, should not be all that hard to do.   But Mega-Hal still has a habit of spouting gibberish just as often, if not more often than not.

Yet its responses seem relevant enough, even if just barely enough, that maybe I could take whatever someone asks the teapot, and then run some kind of mood function, in combination with Mega-Hal to get a "hidden response" that could then be used to simply generate "extra keywords", so that it would be easier for an Eliza style fortune cookie picker to select a relevant response.

Maybe.