Since 3APD no longer has a forum, I thought I'd offer one here. People rarely posted back in the day. The problem is you have to scroll down to get to it and you need to be a dA member to post on it.

What do you think?

Maybe when I start updating again regularly, I'll need to find a way to host my own.

There's a lot of back story about why I was so motivated to set this up, but I'll get to that later.

First, what was I hoping to accomplish? The successful PC alarm clock makes the best use out of existing software rather than having to install other stuff, does its thing without having to be "turned on" every evening before bed, and is "mute proof" (able to turn the system volume on).

The first item needed is NirCmd. The command "nircmd.exe mutesysvolume 0" will turn the volume on. I put nircmd.exe in a folder and created a new batch file with this line.

The second item needed is the ability to play an MP3 from the command line. In Windows, this can be pretty easy and it opens in the default player ... just type in the path to an MP3 file. I have iTunes, and opening an MP3 also copies it to the library (behavior that you can change, but I don't want to just for this), so I made a shortcut file to an MP3 file in my library, and then put the shortcut file in the same location as the batch file and nircmd.exe. Then I added the shortcut's filename to the batch file.

nircmd.exe mutesysvolume 0
s39.lnk

Of course, there are many options and many ways to open a specific MP3, random MP3, or a playlist in various MP3 players. The shortcut worked well enough for me, so I kept it simple.

The third item needed is a scheduler. Windows comes with a task scheduler that's like Unix "cron" but ... ya know ... more Windows-ish.

You can schedule tasks through nircmd.exe, but if you go to program files, accessories, system tools, task scheduler, you can create a scheduled task to run the batch file every weekday morning at a specified time (or any of the other basic options for recurrence). Then just make sure that the computer has power enough to last through the night, and the next morning, the alarm will go off.



So... why? Well, I used to have problems waking up for work. It wasn't every day, it wasn't even very often, but it seems that no one else ever forgets to set their alarm clock and I was forgetting about twice a year. That was too often. So I became much more careful about remembering.

Then I got a Zaurus PDA with a pretty nifty alarm clock app on it. All I had to do was set it once and then make sure that the system's alarm volume wasn't muted and I was able to get multiple alarms every morning that were pretty much idiot-(me)-proof.

Well, I switched to a newer Zaurus PDA and it had some issues with its alarm scheduler. I got out of the habit of using the Zaurus alarm, and started to use the alarm on my cellphone, which was also pretty good. It would come on loudly even if the phone was on vibrate (which it usually is because of work).

Eventually I got my Sony Vaio UMPC (which I'm using right now), and I didn't use a PDA anymore because that was just silly. And I traded the cellphone for a newer one, and it's alarm program just sucks. If the phone's on vibrate, the alarm is on vibrate, and it only alarms for a short time and then it dies. It's annoying when it wakes you up, and annoying if you don't turn it off in time, and easy to miss because the phone's always on vibrate.

So ... the ideal solution is to make my Vaio a programmable alarm clock. And now I have done so. And there shall be much rejoicing. Of course, I'll keep setting my main alarm clock before I go to bed, but now I have the backup option that I need.

Facebook is an evil pyramid scheme. I can see the appeal but I'm bothered that so many of its applications want my address and cellphone number, and they don't tell you that until you are halfway through trying to use it for the first time.

Why is everyone so slow to realize when they're being inconsistent?

I think it is because if no one can function while being deliberately inconsistent, and that creates resistance against seeing the inconsistencies. I'm not saying that I'm consistent in everything I do, and there are probably many ways that I am inconsistent and unaware. But I do hope those inconsistencies will become visible to me at some point and I'll be able to correct them.

Here's one that's been bothering me lately. The whole America's Financial Sector Sucks issue that began early this week. And now the Executive Branch is trying to bail out the financial sector. But Congress is asking for safeguards against CEOs leaving those doomed companies with "golden parachutes" (why do we always have to use such awful cliches? A parachute made out of gold would cause devastating failure and death to the jumper).

Well...

I don't know where I stand on the "bail out" proposal. I'm not an investor and I don't have an economics degree. I think the best course of action is not to poll congressmen, but to poll economics professors and economics experts who are NOT ranking leaders in any major investment firm. Whatever the majority of them favor, that's what Congress should do. That's who will know the answer and who will collectively (not individually) have the least personal bias.

But the inconsistency that I'm talking about is the golden parachute language. If we do anything other than nothing, it's already the so-called golden parachute. It seems hard to believe that there can be blame with any specific individuals (if so, they would already be named). It's corporate policies that are causing the problems. All corporations are at least somewhat corrupt. It's how you do business. If you sold all of your items for what they were worth, you'd never make any money. You have to make a profit. Other businesses assume you are making a profit, but no one ever tells anyone what that profit is, how they accomplished that margin, and what they did to separate themselves from the competition. All of this is "a healthy corruption", I guess. So who's to say when this business scheme goes too far? It's hard to figure that out until damage starts to occur and by then, as history has shown with Enron and the like, it's already too late.

These businesses have already failed, right? If not, they wouldn't be needing government help. So we, taxpayers, are going to be supporting entities that are already to blame. It may or may not be a moral blame (tisk tisk, you should have known better), but at the very least it's a fact-of-life blame (natural selection, survival of the fittest, you just didn't cut it in the business world). Any action at all is handing them benefits that they don't deserve.

The only reason to do such an action is to cause a benefit to the market, the economy, and the nation as a whole. But still, it is an action that will unfairly benefit those people who made the problem. You can't avoid that if you do any bailing out at all.

It's also an issue of inconsistency when you say you respect the Secretary of the Treasury but then don't listen to his recommendations. This guy is beating this thing hard because he's sold out in his belief that it is the remedy we need. If you lawmakers respect him, then you'd respect his recommendations.

Again, I can't say that I respect him because I don't know him, but they do (or at least more than I do). I probably know less than the average American what the right plan should be, but at the very least the right course of action is about what will work for the nation, and the entire global economy, and not a bunch of emotionally driven inconsistencies and blame-pointing. We have a problem, we figure out what the most elegant solution to the problem is, we implement the fix. That's all there needs to be to it.

Stupid politics.

Makes me think of those Nextel commercials that pose the question ... "What if firemen ran government?" I'd sure like to see more firemen-types in government right now.

3APD homepage

Episode 002 - New is live! I still have to update the design of the homepage. I'm such a slacker.

Let me know what you think?

Hopefully on September 30th I'll upload the new version of Episode 003. I think Episode 004 will be the end of Jack's first arc so I will cut over to new content -- Episode 080! It's been awhile since the story progressed, eh?