Posted by Ryan
February 19, 2008
Several years ago (3? 4?) I wrote a tiny little Windows application that plays an MP3 file at a specified time of day. That’s all it does. Nothing fancy. You have to select an MP3 file, type the time of day precisely (eg. “6:00 AM”), and check a little checkbox. I’ve opened up to 50 instances of the little app at a time and set them all manually to play some MP3 file at different times to ensure I’ll wake up. It works.
There are many applications out there that do alarms much better than this little thing, but I recently got an email requesting it so I thought I’d share. Heck, notwithstanding all the fancy alarm apps out there I still use this excruciatingly simple thing. The simplest solution isn’t always the best solution, but is often the most used.
Download the self-extracting exe file – 288 KB
Posted by Ryan
June 7, 2007
So I’ve been all sorts of productive today. Sort of. When I say that I really mean that I’ve put off a lot of important things in order to do other, perhaps less important things. Are they really less important though? I’m not sure they are.
Have you heard of DailyLit? It’s so incredibly awesome. I discovered it a week ago? Two weeks ago? I don’t remember, but I am loving it. Basically, you can read a book in your email or in an RSS feed. The idea is that people don’t want to take the time, or don’t have the time to sit down and read a book so you can have them send you pieces of the book everyday, or weekdays, or whatever! I signed up to get emails every weekday of the books A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. It’s got to be one of the coolest ways to read a book. I often don’t feel like I can justify picking up a book and reading it, but reading a short email is easily justifiable. Each e-mail contains a link to have the next part of the book sent to you immediately, which I took advantage of a great deal tonight while reading both books. Anyway…
Yesterday and today I’ve been occupied with updating this website, along with Learn4Liberty. I haven’t done much aesthetically; I’ve mostly been cleaning up crap, finding and installing wordpress plugins, getting distracted with reading a bunch of stuff I found off of reddit, coming up with ideas for websites, etc.
In the process of doing all this updating I realized that I didn’t have an about page for this site. I was linking to the about page on ryanware.com, but that’s not all that helpful if you, say, actually wanted to learn something about me as an individual. So I started writing about myself, which I’ve never really enjoyed.
From my About Me page:
I’m really good at sleeping in. I have been known, at least twice a week, to push snooze on my alarm clock for anywhere from 1-5 hours. If sleeping in was a lucrative profession, I would be the Bill Gates of it. I wrote a little alarm program for my computer, which I use to blast music from my speakers at the time I desire to wake up. My sister, who also loves to sleep in, told me “that’s the loudest alarm I have ever heard.” The alarm does remarkably well at getting me out of bed. In fact, the speed with which I usually jump out of bed is akin to that of a butterfly attached to a bowling ball dropped from an airplane. What’s even more remarkable is that I turn the alarms off (after typing in 1-2 passwords) only to get back in bed. I am improving though! Really! It goes in cycles, but I am improving.
So a few weeks ago I was doing really good at waking up. I was a waking up early machine. I set my alarm and BAM I was out of bed and I stayed out of bed! It was great. And then I started staying up really late working on a deadline. Then I went on a dancing adventure to Denver. And then to Seattle. And now I’m back to sleeping in really late and staying up really late. Case in point: it’s now 3 AM as I write this.
So where does the “oh crap!” moment come in? So while I was writing that section about sleeping in I realized that tomorrow (err… today) is Thursday. And on Thursdays I wake up at 5:30 AM to attend a weekly Toastmasters club meeting. I’m not even tired yet! Okay, maybe I’m a little tired, but I certainly will be very tired by the time 5:30 rolls around. Especially if I don’t sleep, and even more especially if I do sleep. crap.
So of course I had to write about it, instead of going to bed when I realized that I was going to wake up so early.
But seriously, check out DailyLit. I’m addicted and loving it.
Posted by Ryan
May 9, 2007
So for the past 3 weeks or so I have been waking up between 5 AM and 10 AM. I’ve finally trained myself to wake up and stay up when my alarm goes off. But, it only works if it’s a certain song being blasted out of my computer speakers. I still don’t wake up to my normal alarm clock and there’s been two or three days out of the 3 or so weeks that I’ve slept in. Last night, for example, I only set my alarm clock, too lazy to setup the alarm on the computer. So this morning I apparently turned it off in my sleep and slept until about 12:30 PM.
Lesson: once you have a way you can wake up early, stick to it.
I’m pretty excited though about this whole waking up early thing. I can now set my alarm for whenever I want and I know I will wake up. That is, as long as it’s that one song on my computer.
The song is “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” by Sufjan Stevens, on his Songs for Christmas album. Go figure.
