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The Morning, She Is Not Kind to Me (Alarm Program Question)
potpourri
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Howdy, all.
For the past two years I've been using an iPhone as my means of getting up in the morning. When I absolutely have to get up, this is fine; when I have a plane to catch, or someplace I absolutely have to be, even Half-Asleep Me can get his shit together enough to get out of bed and get moving.
The problem seems to be when I don't have a specific and immutable reason for waking up. I've been using the iPhone for long enough that not only is the process of shutting the alarm off something I can (quite literally, apparently) do in my sleep, but it seems as though all the iPhone sounds ("Cricket," "Marimba," etc.) have ceased being regular "sounds" that startle me out of sleep, and more triggers for a spooky conditioned behavior (viz. Get Up, Turn Off Phone, Get Back in Bed). When I am trying to get up early for the sake of getting up early (and early here is super relative -- this whole winter I was getting up at 8 or 9 on days when I didn't have class, without even an alarm; these days, I'd be happy to be up at ten or even eleven, and I sleep till 12 pretty regularly -- which is just unacceptable), the iPhone, simply, doesn't cut it.
So what I think I want is a (free!) program for Mac or PC that allows me to set an alarm using my own music -- something that will go off when I tell it to with the music I want it to. I think that using different music all the time, and music with a good association (compared to all the iPhone jingles, which have very negative associations), could get me up at the right time.
Does anyone know of a program like that? If anyone has any other tips, too, I'd love to hear them (going to bed earlier is something I'm working on, setting my phone far away from my bed does nothing anymore, and setting up more alarms in a small span of time just decreases the effectiveness of less alarms without getting me up more frequently; also, nothing super obnoxious or annoying, as I just moved into a house with friendly strangers and don't want to be sounding a klaxon every morning).
Thanaaananks
For the past two years I've been using an iPhone as my means of getting up in the morning. When I absolutely have to get up, this is fine; when I have a plane to catch, or someplace I absolutely have to be, even Half-Asleep Me can get his shit together enough to get out of bed and get moving.
The problem seems to be when I don't have a specific and immutable reason for waking up. I've been using the iPhone for long enough that not only is the process of shutting the alarm off something I can (quite literally, apparently) do in my sleep, but it seems as though all the iPhone sounds ("Cricket," "Marimba," etc.) have ceased being regular "sounds" that startle me out of sleep, and more triggers for a spooky conditioned behavior (viz. Get Up, Turn Off Phone, Get Back in Bed). When I am trying to get up early for the sake of getting up early (and early here is super relative -- this whole winter I was getting up at 8 or 9 on days when I didn't have class, without even an alarm; these days, I'd be happy to be up at ten or even eleven, and I sleep till 12 pretty regularly -- which is just unacceptable), the iPhone, simply, doesn't cut it.
So what I think I want is a (free!) program for Mac or PC that allows me to set an alarm using my own music -- something that will go off when I tell it to with the music I want it to. I think that using different music all the time, and music with a good association (compared to all the iPhone jingles, which have very negative associations), could get me up at the right time.
Does anyone know of a program like that? If anyone has any other tips, too, I'd love to hear them (going to bed earlier is something I'm working on, setting my phone far away from my bed does nothing anymore, and setting up more alarms in a small span of time just decreases the effectiveness of less alarms without getting me up more frequently; also, nothing super obnoxious or annoying, as I just moved into a house with friendly strangers and don't want to be sounding a klaxon every morning).
Thanaaananks
potpourri on
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Beware, though, that whatever song you pick to wake up to will start to sound worse and worse as time goes on. I had iCal set to play the Imperial March every morning and now I can't stand to hear it.
I like to think I'm conditioning myself well.
Now I just need to be careful not to turn all my favorite songs into "wake-up songs;" for three years as a teenager I woke up to Genius of Love by the Tom Tom Heads, and now whenever I hear it I experience some very unpleasant sensations
"It was all a dream..."
This assumes you have a roomba and three Australian Terriers, though.
There is an app I use on my G1 called Math Alarm. It plays a specified tone/music file and won't stop until you complete a given math question. Trying to solve (X*4) - 64 = 112 first thing in the morning isn't easy.
Listen to it and you'll know why.
But yeah some of them have math questions, some have spelling or similarity questions; you can change the difficulty and number of questions to answer before it stops.
Short of that, I regularly play "hide the phone" and stick it someplace strange and out-of-reach in order to force myself into being both on my feet and awake enough to open a cabinet or look under the couch. I find that if I manage that I'll not be late for work.