I dont know if you guys have ever come accross james berger’s page… but for some reason I come accross it a lot! It’s just some random guy at university of dallas. Anyways, I wanted to put this excerpt from his site (His site is down now, I got this from the cached pages in google). It’s a good tip, something I’ve been using for a while
Waking up. That darn annoying thing that that seems to happen to me every morning, interrupting my sleep with this “consciousness” crap.
I am not a happy person when I wake up. Generally, I feel like taking heads when I get up most of the time. That annoying beeping from my alarm almost used to drive me to the brink of madness. But, I learned a handy trick from my roommate my freshman year - how to wake up to delightful music in the morning instead of the agonizing beeping from hell. Now I wake up with a smile on my face, versus waking up and seeing the world through a tunnel of blood red haze. Much better, and if you were one of the poor headless corpses outside my door, I’m definitely sure you’d agree too.
The miracle is accomplished with Winamp (thank you Nullsoft for saving my sanity, and me, quite possibly, from a long jail sentence too). How? Quite easily, with the Scheduled Tasks Manager, a innocuous and rather powerful little program that has been in every version of Windows since '95. Just start up the task scheduler, select Winamp as the program you want it to start, and select the times you want it to start playing. Then, in the scheduled tasks folder, right-click the icon of the task you just set up and select ‘properties’ That’ll open up a little box that will have a line that says ‘Run:’ and the path to Winamp on your computer, C:\PROGRA~1\WINAMP\Winamp.exe, for example. Add “D:\mp3\wakeup.m3u” right after it (keep the quotes), so it looks like this:
Thats really cool, never thought of that - thanks!
Although I think I’ll stick to my origonal game plan that has worked through 3 years of college: just don’t get up, and if there is something making noise to wake you - smash it. This plan has helped me to avoid unpleasant (I assume, considering I wasn’t awake yet) mornings, as well as nagging research paper deadlines. I find it effective, and self perpetuating… if you sleep through a class, you can always forget about it by sleeping through the next.
Peace
PS although I think I am going to start using the method you described… the sound of an alarm makes me homicidal (I hope my rommate is ok with that - considering he as 2 classes and never really wakes up before 11 - ahhhhh, I’m just jealous).
mmh mine hasnt been of for something like a week; it’s just i do renders with radiosity and caustics in Cinema4D and it takes 20+ minutes to render a single frame…
Cool trick with Winamp though i think i might try this…
Waking up to good music can really alter your day. Man was not meant to be awoken by an annoying BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. I theorize this is why humans are so violent. Its the alarm clocks.
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