It made me feel like more of an adult. I couldn't just sleep in as long as I wanted, nor could I simply rely on my parents to get me up. No, I was now responsible for getting myself up. Yeah... I was like in the fifth grade.
Anywho... like most technological thing the alarm clock eventually failed. If I'm remembering correctly, that one failed because it started losing time. Not a few mintues a week, but a several minutes a day. It was bad enough that I would have to set it each night and it would still lose several minutes by the morning. I was in highschool at the time and working at McDonalds, so I took the next step in responsibility and bought myself an alarm clock. This one was special... it could wake you up to a CD! Woo Hoo!
It also had a feature that I truly fell in love with... a sleep timer. Not only could you wake up to a CD, you could at the press of a button have it play music (radio or CD) for an hour. Since that time back in 1990, I have always gone to sleep listening to music.
As with most things in life, I'm not an easy person to please. If it's not JUST right, then it's all wrong. And going to sleep to music has been a struggle. At first, I would listen to the radio. But in listening to the radio there are distractions. First, between the songs the DJ will often come on and tell you what just played before pitching up the next song. Second there are commercials... and commercials are NOT music. For a lot of people I imagine that wouldn't be a deal breaker, but for me it is. You see, I don't take all that long to fall asleep. I normally fall asleep, when music is present, in two or three songs. Seriously. The first song is normally spent with me either finding the prefectly comfortable position and/or getting warm. Once that bliss has been met, I just fall asleep.
IF there's music. If the DJ's voice comes on or worse yet a commercial comes crashing in, it takes me out of that bliss and I have to wait for the next song. Naturally the solution is to provide my own music. So I eventually made a CD of 'going to sleep' music and dropped that in to drift off to. But a CD just doesn't have enough music. After a few weeks, I get tired (tired... HA!) of going to sleep to the same few songs. Even if they were in random order. So eventually I went back to the radio and just accepted that it would take me between three and fifteen minutes to drift off.
Fast forward to 2011. I was helping my mother pick out some gifts for my neice, and one thing she wanted was a clock radio that her iPod would fit into. I helped her select out a nice pink one and I thought it was done. When mom asked me if it was something that I would want, my mind skipped a gear and started reving.
YES!!! Well.. not the pink one, but YES!!! It would be the best of all worlds. I could listen to music and not just a dozen or so songs. I could easily pick out a 'going to sleep' playlist of a couple hundred songs. I even had my old third generation ipod (the first one I owned) that would work perfectly for it. I had replaced it with a third generation iPod nano years back because the battery had gone to crap. The battery, however, wouldn't be an issue as it would be plugged in all the time.
YAY!!
So I picked out an iHome alarm clock that would fit my iPod and waited until Christmas.
Excitement turned quickly into frustration. Yes, the iPod would work fine in the clock radio as it was plugged in. But the battery was so far gone that I couldn't even plug it into my computer. The little bit of juice coming from the computer wasn't enough to keep it running... and without hooking it up to the computer I couldn't get my music on it.
So I had this wonderful expensive alarm clock that wasn't any better than any other $10 alarm clock. Tax season came and I decided to get this thing working right... I went out and bought an iPod Touch. Sure, I could have gotten away with a far cheaper iPod Nano (or Mini, or whatever they were calling them those days), but with the iPod Touch I could use the iHome App and actually control the Alarm clock from the iPod (iI am iGetting sick and iTired of typing out iThese iIs before iAlmost every iWord).
Bliss was mine. It worked wonderfully. I set up separate playlists for going to sleep and waking up. Instead of fumbling for the buttons on the alarm clock itself I simply had to swipe the screen to 'go to sleep' and swipe it again to silence the alarm.
Not that I used the alarm all that often. I was only working one day a week back then. That was a bit of frustration as the only way to 'sleep' with music was to have an alarm to wake up too. I eventually figured out that I could set the alarm for like 9am (way past whenever I normaly would get up) and have it play an empty playlist. It would still wake up (i.e. make the screen come to full brightness), but it didn't start blaring out music or sounds or anything else. I would have to just swipe the screen to turn the silent alarm off.
And then technology moved on. Apple released several new versions of their iOS and iHome had to update their software to make their products continue to work. And evidently as long as they were fixing iIssues, they decided to upgrade their software in other ways. One of their 'upgrades' was removing the random/shuffle playlist feature.
Yes, I could still listen to my playlist of 200+ songs, but it would be in the same order every single night. Grrr.
I wrote them. I complained. They responded. They didn't change a thing.
That's been going on for about a year now. I compenstate a bit by having the remote control sit next to my bed and hitting the 'next' button a couple dozen times before getting comfortable. But with the same songs in the same order... well I now know what song will be playing next. And that bothers me.
Two nights ago I finally changed up the song list a bit... mainly changing the order the songs are in, but also adding a few more. I still have to use the remote to get it to a different starting position, but eventually I'm going to be back in the same position.
Salvation though, may just come from the ultimate change... stop using an alarm clock.
Really, all the alarm clock is, is a way to play music while I go to sleep. I ceratinly don't need a time piece in my bedroom. I have a computer in front of me most of the time, and if I'm going to sleep I have my phone sitting right next to me. I don't need an alarm to get up, and when I do, more often than not I simply set an alarm on my phone. It's far easier to set that up rather than going through the 15 step process to not only set up an alarm on my iPodiHomeiAlarmiClock, but to also set that alarm up with the proper sleep playlist.
So all I need is a method of playing music. I could use my computer... I'm sure there are programs that could play for a particular amount of time, and if not I could simply set up random playlists that last only one hour. But the computer is ALSO right next to my bed and it's soft whine would be a bit too much white noise. Plus that's using a LOT of electricity just to listen to a bit of music.
I could use my phone, but my Galaxy S4 didn't have enough memory to store all of my music. Nor did it have a good speaker system... it only has one speaker in the rear. And even if it did, I wouldn't want to kill the battery each and every night. The charger is across the room, so I couldn't really leave it plugged in either.
Enter the Nexus 6.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I got a new phone. Lemme spend a few moments going over that before I return to the sleep madness.
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A couple weeks back I spilled some soda over my phone. At first, it was no big deal. The phone, once wiped clean, was fine. But I guess that sugary liquid worked its way in to all the crevices and eventually started wreaking havoc.
The first problem that I noticed was the home button. Instead of having soft key buttons like almost every other Android device, the home button on Samsung Galaxy devices is a physical button. Once it was doused in sugary liquidness, it started sticking. If you hold down that button for awhile it ques up S Voice.. Samsung's sad attempt to beat Siri. It sucks and I never use it. But over the past couple weeks I've loaded S Voice dozens of times by accident. The phone also started to just shut down at random times. The battery was fine, it just decides to turn off. And then the battery started to get wonky all on it's own.
While watching the college football national championship game at my brothers, I had to charge the phone. Twice. I was there for a grand total of nine hours, but I completly drained the battery with only moderate use. Twice. The battery wasn't even getting me a day when I used it only a little bit. It started to die on a regular basis while driving home from work... which means I was charging it in my car every night.
Now at that point, I wasn't up for my upgrade until April 1st. So I saw this as four choices:
- Continue to limp along with my broke ass phone for 11 weeks and pray it didn't completely die.
- Change back to a previous phone and limp along without any android goodness
- Purchase a used Android handset for around $100 or $200 and wait until I could get a new state of the art phone in April.
- Go whole hog and just get a new phone without any discount.
The decision became easy once I got my last check. You see this check included all of my holiday/overtime hours for the Christmas Holiday. With Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Years Eve, and New Years day all being holidays, I had 32 hours of holiday time. Add in the overtime that those holiday hours include and my check was more or less double. And it's not as though I was low on cash before this.. I had plenty of money for my upcoming trip to Chicago, as well as enough incoming money for other trips.
So I did one last bit of research, but went back to what I had decided on in November. I would get the Nexus 6. The salesman and manager of the local Sprint store both said they've never seen a customer purchase one of their Hero phones at full price. I guess that's something they can scratch off their lists, as I walked out $649 (plus tax) lighter, but heavier by one Nexus 6.
Without going into to much detail, the phone is glorious. Beautiful screen, fast as a whip, huge (Six Freaking Inches!), and all manner of niceness coming from Android Lollipop.
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So, how exactly does the Nexus 6 fit into my sleeping patterns? Well with it's stereo speakers, I'm sure it will work just fine as a sleeping musical device. It also has wireless charging, so one of my accessory purchases was a wirelessly charging docking station. At night I can simply set the phone in it's cradle (no fiddling with a cable connection) and it will have power all night. And with a simple app or two it will turn it's screen on in lower power to display a clock AND play music for an hour. A random selection of music.
Yes.... I believe my alarm clock will finally part with the rest of my life. The cradle/dock thingie should arrive either late this week, or early next week. I think I'll give it a try before actually tossing the alarm clock out.
Really the only question I have left is.... what am I going to do with the iPod Touch?
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