Clocky the rolling alarm clock

I know several people that could use this:

Scientists have created an alarm clock that simply doesn't know when to stop... until you wake up. 'Clocky' has an ingenious way for rousing even the most dedicated morning dozer...by rolling off the bedside table after you hit the snooze button.

Behaving like a troublesome pet that aims to wake you up, it allows you just one press of the snooze button because when the alarm goes off, and you hit snooze, it rolls off the surface it is sitting on and finds a hiding spot.

The contraption, devised by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, zooms away on a set of wheels to some other part of the room, finding a different place every day, reports New Scientist. The direction that it travels is completely random. This means that when the alarm goes off again, you are going to have to get up to hunt for Clocky to turn off the alarm.

When the alarm sounds again, simply finding Clocky ought to be strenuous enough to prevent even the sleepiest owner from nodding off again.

March Dumbness UPDATE

Unfortunately, my March Dumbness strategy is not working as well as I had planned. While it's certainly easier to handle being wrong when you don't put a lot of time and effort into something, I'm not very satisfied with being in the 31st percentile and 16th out of 21 teams in my office pool.

To make matters worse, I happened to fill out another bracket just for fun that I didn't use for any official pool that is now (morning of 3/26/05) in the 99th percentile and would be winning the office pool:

Anyone looking for a nice office??

My officemate will be leaving a week from today and began to pack his things up today. While it's not that I'll be lonely or anything, I'm starting to realize the many possible flavors of misery I could could be tasting with a new officemate. I'm not going to mention any names, but there are several individuals I can think of that may force me to demote myself to an internal office without a window or maybe even a closet to avoid having to deal with them. I need to think of someone I would like and get the ball moving to get them in with me soon. This is one of those things where you don't realize how good you have it until someone's gone...or almost gone.

March Dumbness

With the exception of one of the NCAA pools I was a part of last year, the winner of the NCAA Tournament pools I participate in always seems to be someone who knows nothing at all about basketball and, more often than not, ends up being a girl who made her selections based on the cutest mascots or favorite colors. In an attempt to mimic this success, I have created my bracket this year with the absolute minimum amount of thought possible. We'll see if this "March Dumbness" strategy works...

In good hands...

STRASBURG, Va. (AP) - A police chief was ordered held without bail Monday on charges of driving drunk twice in one day. Middletown Police Chief Roger Ashley has been held in jail since his arrest Saturday. An April 11 trial was scheduled after a court appearance Monday.

Ashley was arrested the first time in his unmarked police car and a second time, five hours later, in his personal vehicle, Strasburg Police Chief Marshall Robinson said.

Officers responded to the first arrest after Robinson's car had run into a vehicle on Route 11 in this northern Virginia community.

Robinson was arrested a second time in his personal vehicle, police said.

Robinson's status as chief of Middletown was to be reviewed by town leaders later Monday.

I don't remember you

Sleep scientists say that:

• Recognition memory for faces is unaffected by sleep loss. A person who has not slept for as much as 35 hours can perform as well as someone who is not sleep deprived.
• The area of the brain that controls temporal memory can be affected by prolonged sleep loss and/or ageing. So a healthy 65 year old who sleeps normally would be able to perform this test similarly to a 20 year old who has gone without sleep for 36 hours.

Interesting...take the Face Memory Test to find out if you're getting enough sleep.

My scores:

• Recognition Score: 100%
• Temporal Score: 79%

Not the greatest, but surprised I even did that well based on my terrible memory.

Strange Weather

Yesterday it was 70°F, today it snowed horizontally...really.

New Firefox Release

Mozilla has recently announced an update to Firefox that addresses a number of security issues and other bug fixes. This includes the IDN homograph spoofing problem I noted a few weeks ago and several other fixes to guard against spoofing and arbitrary code execution.

Make note of the following: "Prior to installing Firefox 1.0.1, please ensure that the directory you've chosen to install into is clean and doesn't contain any previous Firefox installations." Your extensions, bookmarks, etc. will automatically transfer over provided they are compatible with the new version since your profile information is stored elsewhere. You can read the rest of the release notes and download the new version at http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/releases/.