Wanna Buy a Clock Radio?

[Michael Oltmans <moltmans@>]

Wanna buy a clock?
No?

Well I do.  In fact I wanna buy an alarm clock.  A fancy one with a 
radio built in.  Unfortunately the guys in NY don't generally carry such 
large items in their suitcases and trench coats so I'm left with the 
more usual options of Target, Amazon, and whatnot.

Now it seems to me that the radio alarm clock is a pretty simple device 
with pretty simple requirements.  We've managed to send people to the 
moon, make computers that can defeat chess champions, and write programs 
that can (usually) tell the difference between pictures of motor bikes 
and pictures of spotted cats, but apparently making a device that beeps 
at a certain time of day, until you push a button, still eludes us.

Reading reviews of clock radios is like going to the museum of failed 
user centered design.  People complain of not being able to set the 
time, of having snooze buttons placed next to or between buttons that 
change the time or shut off the alarm (I don't know about you but my 
dexterity isn't so hot with a blaring alarm going off).  Then there are 
reviews of clocks that don't keep time and physically fall apart and 
those that lie on the boxes (apparently an "atomic clock" can be defined 
as: "comes with a preset time and a battery", they must mean that it is 
made from atoms).  And there's always Clocky 
(http://www.media.mit.edu/press/clocky/).

I've now spent more time researching my next clock radio than I spent 
picking out my last computer.  And I get the feeling that it's more 
likely to be the wrong decision anyway.  Oh well at least it's only $30.

So set your alarm, start a cron job to send you a reminder, put it in 
your calender but whatever you do, don't sleep through tonight's special 
Whine About Consumer Electronics, edition of...

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