Asleep-me VS awake-me

22 June 2014

My complicated alarm clock setup is the result of an epic competition between awake-me and asleep-me. To begin with, I had a computer program as an alarm clock. It wakes first the computer and then me. To turn it off, I first have to type my password. This was a minor hurdle for the sleeping me — I'd sometimes type my password and turn off the alarm clock while basically asleep and with no memory of the event afterwards.

The next step was to put up a lot of alarms, one minute apart. I have to disable them all, which involves 15 minutes of clicking around, which is usually sufficient to wake me up more or less. Good, but sleeping-me realised he could just quit the program, thus easily disabling all alarms. Awake-me made the program a daemon, which means it gets restarted by the system immediately after it quits. (The instructions I found said about what I did — don't do this, or you won't be able to quit the program, even when you want. Well, that's exactly what I was looking for!)

As of now, the easiest way to turn off the alarms is to plug an audio cable that is not connected to any device that is on. The easiest to reach of such cables is intentionally buried in a drawer in the other room. In order to get it, I have to get to a half-awake state, when I either have the will to get up, or plug the cable in and get back to sleep. I am wondering if the effectiveness of this is sufficient, or if I should bring that cable outside to the mailbox every evening...