Alarm Clocks

If you have trouble waking up in the mornings, this post is for you. Every now and then a new alarm clock is introduced to the world to help people wake up on time. Here’s a collection I’ve gathered:

And these are my personal favorites:

  • Clocky, which actually hides away in the room once you hit the snooze button.
  • Anemone Alarm Clock, which not only starts shaking to run away from you, but also keeps shaking and sounding the alarm until you put in enough strength to calm it down.
  • The Hanging Alarm Clock that you hang over your head and every time you hit snooze will get further away from you.
  • The Jigsaw Puzzle Alarm Clock, which makes you solve a little jigsaw puzzle to stop the alarm.

These are all cool and funny, but the real “alarm clock” I would like to own is actually a watch named SLEEPTRACKER, which sets off the alarm when it senses the best time for you to wake up, in the sense that you will be “the most awake” when it sounds the alarm. I love the idea of this product, and most reviews say it really works (when it comes to sleep, of course this kind of thing won’t work for everybody). Basically, I’m just waiting for a version 2.0, as I usually do with gadgets.

How I lost and found my keys at The Prodigy’s live show

Some of you know how I sometimes brag about never losing my keys (with one exception – losing and finding (!) my computer farm access card) . Anyway, in Reading Festival 2002 I had on me in 2 separate key chains – my Israel house key (it was attached to my watch, that’s why I carried it!) and my hostel room key.

After the Prodigy’s concert (the end of the second day of the festival) Katz, who I was touring England with, asked me for the time. Of course I lost my Israel house key, and then I found out that the hostel room key was missing as well.

In this festival there were around 70,000 people. Looking for the keys was a long shot. It was such a lost cause, that even I had my doubts about my chance of success. But since I’ve had luck with finding things before and we were standing at the same place for the entire show, I asked Katz to hold on for a few minutes, and let me look for the keys.

Katz said ok, and sat down on the grass. I was looking for the keys all around when Katz noticed from her sitting place a guy kicking something that was making ringing sounds on the grass. She said I should check it out, and it was my Israel house key! The Italian guy, who was kicking the key around, was so surprised when we thanked him, that he thought we were making fun of him at first. Then I decided to look around the place where the guy was kicking my house key, and found my hostel room key as well.

So now I can go back to bragging about never losing my keys :)

Reading Festival 2002 – The last time I saw The Prodigy live

The last time I saw The Prodigy live was at Reading Festival 2002. It was a dream come true for me, in the sense that The Prodigy always give their best shows in the UK. Although I went crazy dancing and shouting during the concert (for a few seconds there I actually lost my breath and thought I was about to faint), it was still not Prodigy’s best. One reason is that in that festival performers get only one hour for their show, and a full live Prodigy show is longer than that.

The second reason is that it was a bad time for The Prodigy as a band – they were trying to do a comeback with material that was written in a very similar pattern to their previous album, so it wasn’t that ground-breaking as you’d expect from new Prodigy material. Luckily, later on Liam Howlett (Prodigy’s prodigy) realized what was happening, went back to the drawing board and brought back with him two years later the fourth album, AONO (Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned).

But don’t get me wrong – the show still rocked and the crowd went crazy, which only goes to show why The Prodigy are such a great band.

1 year, 300 workouts

Exactly one year ago I started working out. I went to the gym with no expectations what-so-ever. I didn’t have anything that I bought especially for working out – I went there with boxer shorts and one of my worn out T-shirts.

During this one year I did exactly 300 workouts. Well, actually 299 – today was workout 300. And today being New Year’s Eve makes it even more festive. I worked out 6 days every week, and only missed workouts when I was sick or when the gym was closed. Except for one time, when my mom was sick and I went over to her house to take her to the doctor. But that was worth missing practice for.

I also changed my diet completely. These days I eat deep-fried foods very rarely (once every 2 months, maybe), I don’t eat any sweets of any kind, no snacks, almost no white bread. And I used to love this stuff.

Today I look better than I did one year ago, I feel better than I did one year ago and I get many compliments, which is also great. I hope that I can go on like this and stay fit and healthy. Maybe some day I’ll be able to say about myself that I have made “the change”.

I wish you all a happy new year, with a lot of love and happiness.

Slashdot

As Slashdot‘s title declares, it’s a website about “news for nerds, stuff that matters”. It’s one of the busiest websites on the Internet. So busy that if a news item contains a link in Slashdot, then the phenomenon of Slashdot reader clicking the link and killing the target server is called Slashdotting.

But it’s not just the main items that are a good read. Some of the comments by the readers (which get promoted or demoted by other users, and therefore you get to see the good ones) are sometimes very interesting or funny.

Download Squad

Download Squad is a downloads blog, which highlights all kinds of software that is out there, some software related news and time wasters. I got to some pretty interesting and useful software through this blog, and that’s why it’s on my RSS feed list.