Haven't been posting much, lately. I haven't really had anything to say/share and why post just to hear the sound of my own voice? There are millions of blogs like that out there, and I'm not gonna be one of them. I get ideas now and then, but I don't want to surf/post from work, so by the time I get around to a computer after-hours I forget. I did do some cleaning up of the categories and housekeeping things around the site though, in preparation for the upgrade to 1.8 and then re-configuring my page template from there. Anyway...

What's up with ALL alarm clocks sucking so hard? I've had the same Sony Dream Machine AM/FM alarm clock since high school. I got it for christmas one year, and it's made the transition from mullet-wearing CFOX days through the transition to Z95 dance/club days, down to Cayman twice and stuck with me through my one-year “prison term” in Texas, too.

It was one of the first ones that I ever heard of that had a battery backup, it has large numbers that are easy to read, and a big snooze bar. The alarm is good: jarring enough to wake you up (when you use it) and the alarm function goes for two hours, rather than the standard 59 minutes.

When I first moved to Cayman, it was summer and there was lots of thunder and lightning. Z99 kept getting zapped so in the morning you would get static instead of radio and could miss the alarm, so I used to use the buzzer alarm. When I moved to The Ranch, I switched to radio. I took it with me to Texas and I don't even remember if I used radio or buzzer there, and to be honest I think I've blocked that year out of my memory. It came back to Cayman with me and survived Hurricane Ivan, even.

When I moved into my current apartment after the hurricane, I was having trouble picking up any radio stations, and had it set to Vibe98 (bleh) because it couldnt pick up Z99 anymore. The little antenna wire for the FM had broken off ages ago and I suspected that that was the problem. I figured my poor little alarm clock had finally gotten too old and stopped working properly. I've been looking at alarm clocks for about the last year, but can't find one with all the features I was looking for. Apparently I'm not the only one, either. Richy has been looking for a dual-alarm, dual-clock setup so that he and his wife can each have an alarm time set, but if EITHER of them smack the snooze bar, then BOTH alarm clocks will snooze. Sounds like a pretty tall order to me. Anyway, he even devoted a whole segment on the podcast he's part of to alarm clock stuff and links.

Just before Hurricane Emily passed by, Seb and I went to “Priced Right” which is a Costco/Sam's Club style store that just opened here on Grand Cayman to get some bulk items (crackers, water, hurricane food) and in their little electronics area they had a Timex alarm clock. It was a little block with big numbers on it's front. It had three alarms: radio, buzzer and nature sounds. It also had a battery backup, and the ability to set different alarms for every day, mon-fri or weekends. Sounded good to me at the time, and it was only $29.99.

I got it home and started setting it up and ran into the first “aww, shit” moment. You could set the radio alarm to go off mon-fri, weekends, or every day (it had a calendar built in so it knew what day it was) but not, say, 7:00 on mon-fri and 9:00 on weekends One or the other was all it did (or everyday) the buzzer alarm was the same, and there was also the nature sounds alarm. I had this great idea of setting the nature sound (ocean) to go off at 6:15, the radio to go off at 7:15 and then in case you missed that, the buzzer would go off at 8:00. Then on the weekends the nature sounds would kick off at 8:00 and then the radio at 9:00. No go. You could set three alarms, one of each, only.

The second “aww, shit” was the nature sounds: there are four nature sound effects. Ocean, forest, babbling brook and summer wind. The Ocean one would have been perfect, except they have this seagull in there. The seagull is too loud and too frequent, and to me sounds more like a surfer going “WHOOOOO!”. Suckage. Forest has TOO MANY bugs and chirps to be relaxing. Babbling Brook is just plain too loud. Rather than sounding like a stream in the woods, it sounds like the whitewater rafting scene in the opening titles of The Land of the Lost when the earth opens up and shook their tiny raft and sent them down 1000 feet below... to the land... of the lost! Finally there's summer wind. I have NO idea what the FUCK it's supposed to sound like, but the first time I turned it on, I had the volume knob up pretty loud and it sounded more like the video clip of Hurricane Ivan I posted last fall. NOT CALMING. In fact, it sent a chill up my arms and down my spine that's how loud and un-relaxing it was.

The third “Aww, shit“ was a couple weeks ago when suddenly the radio alarm went off about twice as loud as usual. I didn't remember touching the volume at all, and wondered who else could have messed with it. I turned it back down, got up, went through the morning routine, and on the drive in to work, Z99 had some station breaks announcing that they were finally back up to 100% broadcast power with a new antenna. I guess when I moved in here in November after the hurricane, I couldn't pick up Z99 because they were only broadcasting at 40% of their signal strength, and sure enough my old alarm clock was able to pick it up again.

The final “aww, shit” is the alarm itself. The alarm goes off (radio, buzzer or nature sounds) for 59 minutes, and shuts off. Pretty standard. The snooze bar, however, COUNTS as NINE of those minutes. If you're like me, you wake up, hit the snooze button a couple times, and then sometimes when you're feeling saucy, or you were up late, you sneak an extra ten minutes.

This morning, the alarm went off at 6:45, I was tired still so I hit snooze a few times and then I woke up to silence... I was well rested, and the sun was up pretty high in the sky. I looked at the clock and it said 8:33 (which means it was really about 8:22) and I was supposed to be at work, on the far side of the traffic of 40,000 cars (that's right, one car for every man, woman and child who resides on the island) at 8:30. I jumped out of bed, splashed some water on my face and shaved: fast and no shave cream, brushed my teeth, threw on some clothes, chucked some food at tweeter and was out the door by 8:40.

The only good thing about the “new” alarm clock is the sleep timer. You can set it for a nature sound effect and then mute the volume in three levels. Babbling Brook on the lowest volume level is OK.

I stopped on the way home tonight and bought a 9 volt battery (those odd square ones that you used to see all the time, but never see anymore) and stuck it in the battery backup slot of my old alarm clock, set the time, set my alarm and tuned in Z99. The “new“ alarm clock is going to see service as a clock somewhere else and maybe some nature sounds now and then, but I'm switching back to my old Sony Dream Machine as of tonight. (NOTE: that last link goes to the newest version of the Dream Machine closest to the dinosaur that I have. It has dual alarms on it, battery backup and extendable snooze... hmm....:) )