14 January 2005

My hotel room in Phoenix on Monday had this super-fancy CD-playing alarm clock. It had two separate alarms (“A” and “B”), and you could configure it to buzz-wake you with “A,” or radio-wake you with “B,” or vice versa, or do a combination buzz/radio alarm, but only on “B” for some reason.

Setting the alarm required holding down either the “B” or “A” button and then using the CD player track changing buttons to change the displayed time. And then configuring whether the alarm should be silent, radio, buzz or radio/buzz was a matter of pressing the “A” or “B” button repeatedly to change the setting. And of course the volumn knob was unmarked, so I couldn’t tell whether I had it full-on or full-off without figuring out how to turn the radio on first to test it.

Arizona

After I finally got the alarm set I didn’t trust it very much, so I did the standard sleep 5h; mpg123 *.mp3 maneuveur just to be sure.

After spending five years being told that the Linux desktop is too hard to use, these fucking alarm clocks boggle my mind. If ordinary people can really figure out how to set the alarm at a hotel, then we are going to make OpenOffice default to vi keybindings in the next Novell Linux Desktop.

I wouldn’t have mentioned any of this, but last night at a hotel in Germany, I encountered the best alarm clock interface I have ever seen, and the contrast between Thursday’s hotel alarm and Monday’s hotel alarm just happens to be one of the most exciting things happening in my life right now.

Words fail.

The only question that picture might raise is why I was setting a 7:00 alarm at 4:11 in the morning. A good question.

Okay, I wrote all the above on an airplane from Germany to Paris, where I was connecting for my flight to Boston. Let’s just say that you cannot make a connection between terminals at Charles de Gaulle airport in 55 minutes. So, Paris tonight. Poor me!