Who ordered the scrambled brains?

OK, long story short since I have a Spanish midterm in about an hour. Set my alarm for 9:30am last night. This morning I snoozed it till 9:55am, then I reset it for 10:30am. At 10:30am, I just turned it off entirely. I was so drowsy I could not wake up. I’d gone to sleep at 2:30am after watching a couple episodes of Scrubs and enjoying a delicious Rialto Special Lager from Trader Joe’s. Could one beer have really put me out that much? Goodness.

Anyway, so when I finally got up I decided I’d get my act together and figure out a better way to wake myself up. First I contemplated using my mp3 player’s alarm function, which allows me to set a time for it to automatically wake up and start playing. If I connect the audio output to my computer speakers, I’ll be set, right? Wrong, because the stupid feature doesn’t work when the device’s battery is being charged by a wall power source. And since of course I charge it at night, I can’t use that feature.

Second thought was to use my desktop computer to play mp3’s at a specified time. It runs Windows XP, so I’d use the Task Scheduler to do it. But my desktop is loud and it disrupts my sleep (absolute silence is a must), so I’d have to figure out how to get it to automatically turn itself on in time for the task to run. First I thought I’d use the Wake-On-LAN feature, which allows the computer to wake itself up if it receives a special signal from the network. Perfect, since my Linux server is always on, I’ll just add a cron job (scheduled task) to send the signal every morning. But no dice, since at long last I determined my cheap-o motherboard doesn’t have the Wake-On-LAN header to make the auxiliary connection with network interface card. Poo! I could just use the BIOS wake-up feature, but that is a huge pain to change, which would be a hinderance since I usually want to wake up at different times every day.

So I sought a better alternative. And then I realized I could just use the Linux server itself as the alarm clock computer. But, it didn’t have an audio card. So I decided I’d have to take it down and install the card, recompile the kernel and configure it blah blah blah and then reboot and take with it my 120 day record of uninterrupted uptime. Then I remembered I had an old USB audio device (output only). I crossed my fingers and built the kernel modules for it (ALSA style), and then plugged it in. With fingers still crossed, I attempted to load the modules… Success! To my surprise (and suspicion) I was able to use newly built modules for USB hardware without having to reboot! (Note 1: The success is slightly tainted since I unnecessarily took the website offline for a couple hours. Note 2: During this charade I had to decide if I wanted to upgrade to the latest kernel sources. I was up for the challenge until Gentoo’s portage warned me that I’d have to configure and use udev since /dev support is gone in new sources. As I researched udev I came across this post about Gentoo’s hackish security, which strongly convinced me that in the near future I should rebuild my server in a less bleeding-edge distribution. Front runners are Fedora and SUSE/Novell at the moment.)

So it took about five hours of leisurely research and experimentation while I could have been working, but now I’m well on my way to waking up to beautiful music everyday (see below) at a respectable time, Rialto Special Lager or not. That’s problem solving, in true Mike McGranahan form.

Just like a prayer, your voice can take me there
Just like a muse to me, you are a mystery
Just like a dream, you are not what you seem
Just like a prayer, no choice your voice can take me there

Not “like a dream” anymore, no, not “like a dream” at all in fact. For I will not be dreaming when I hear your voice henceforth. From now on, you are indeed “what you seem”. Yes, “what you seem,” whatever that may be, indeed.

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