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alarm tech is better than I thought
Wednesday, October 31 2018
Back before I required an alarm to ensure that I would wake up every weekday at 7:30am, I was unsure how trustworthy the alarm app on my Android smartphone would be. I was unsure about whether the alarm would even sound if it happened to be muted. I also was concerned that I would have to set an alarm every day explicitly, and that I might just forget one night and then there would be no alarm to wake me. I had so many concerns that I actually considered getting some sort of simple single-purpose alarm clock. But after two months of needing an alarm clock, I have to say that the one on my phone is perfect for the task. It's not the normal Android alarm; it's something called Mi Alarm, part of the MIUI Android distribution targeted at users in mainland China. Somewhat disturbingly, the app seems to phone home to a centralized server about my sleep habits, and I can see how it compares to anonymous "others." I wouldn't be surprised if this data (at least for people in China) contributes to Black-Mirroresque Zhima Credit ratings. Normally MIUI phones are not seen in the United States, but I bought mine for cheap on eBay (and when it came, it didn't even have the Google Suite installed on it). I set the alarm precisely once, with a provision that it repeat every weekday morning at 7:30am. If I get up before the alarm, I just cancel that one instance. If I don't, it starts buzzing and making bird noises atop a pleasant musical piece that gradually grows louder. That was what I awoke to this morning. It caught me in the middle of a dream, the details of which I immediately forgot but the gist of which was that things are going okay in my life right now.
Today was a Ramona-gets-to-go-to-work day, and so I hurried through my pre-work chores to open up the time for a quick poop walk on the Farm Road before the 25 minute commute across the Hudson. As happened last time, both Neville and Ramona jumped into the Subaru, but I had to remove Neville, since only Ramona would be coming. Neville would have his own separate workday.
Ramona was such a well-behaved dog today that some people in the office didn't know there was even a dog present until late in the day.
I made great progress on my ExtJS self-education, eventually figuring out how to obtain and display all the data for a new feature. I was feeling so good about this that by the end of the day I allowed myself to participate in the late-day banter on my side of the room. People were comparing and contrasting the east side of the Hudson (and the villages there) with those on the west side. It was amusing to hear one of my colleagues express a shocking ignorance of Kingston, a city I expect everyone around here to be familiar with. This gave me the opportunity to float one of my better heuristics: that the east side of the Hudson is New England and the west side is the Midwest.
It was a warm, cloudy evening, and I didn't leave work until after 5:00pm, so by the time I got home, the light was decidedly murky. Nevertheless I managed to salvage a backpack load of fairly dry oak from west of the Farm Road.
I'd totally forgotten that today was Halloween and it took seeing a woman at the shop across the street from my workplace dressed in a slutty black cat outfit to remind me. Gretchen had gone to the bookstore wearing her purple wig and purple tights (I knew about the wig but not the tights).
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Halloween is enough of a holiday for me to justify having drinking alcohol, though I managed to do so with restraint.
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