When I was a teenager, I had an old tube radio alarm clock to help me get up. My brother Jeff had taken it to electronics class and somehow rigged it to go to eleven twenty-two.

I would set up the analog clock alarm on the radio to about halfway and placed it across the room, set to the worst radio station in town.

Most days, at the click and the 60-cycle hum of the tubes, I would be up and out of bed before I woke up.

Okay, I'm sending the Mp3 to smonster. anyone else?

I need a loud, obnoxious noise.

My Mac is set to play me Alien Ant Farm's cover of Smooth Criminal which qualifies as loud obnoxious noise and music. I usually wake up before it in some sort of panic that I've unplugged the computer overnight (and for medication purposes I depend on waking up an hour or so before it goes off so I can take meds the proper amount of time before medication) so I'm obviously not hard to wake and I can *never* get back to sleep which I despise, because on weekends I really want to sleep past 6:30am.

I can't remember -- what's the recipe Web site where you can type in what ingredients you have and it tells you what you can make?

is there anyone who has/had massive issues getting up on time and found ways to deal with it?

I don't really have a problem with waking up. My problem is that I'm a daydreamer, which can attack anytime my mind thinks it has a few moments to itself. And those moments becomes minutes. So if I got up early and I'm nearly done and ready to go, my mind would float to whereit'sgoing, and poof - 15 minutes passes.

Thankfully, I'm usually very strict with myself and my mind knows better than to float to whereabouts. But sometimes, it has a will of its own...

Okay, I'm sending the Mp3 to smonster. anyone else?

Yo!

My Blackberry's alarm is annoying enough, plus I have myself trained to be up and moving to go for a run before I even gain higher brain functions.

It does help that my current job allows me to have my optimal sleep time (2 a.m. - 10 a.m.).

set to the worst radio station in town.

Also very effective.

I don't tend to have issues waking up at all. If anything, I wake up too easily. And I cannot be shocked awake or I will be vile and feel off-kilter the rest of the day. So I tend to pick music that eases me into my day-- for a long time it was Brubeck's Time Out, lately it's been The California Guitar Trio.

As far as appetizers for tonight, I'm making a baked brie with raspberry and almonds, plus a bought spinach and artichoke dip from Fresh Market along with assorted chips & crackers and for the slightly health conscious, some organic baby carrots.

I wish that Sleep Cycle app worked on a Touch. Some days I wake up completely refreshed and some days I don't seem to wake up at all, and it seems like I'm getting the same amount of sleep for either so I'm thinking it may be a matter of where in the cycle I wake up. Or some other thing I haven't considered. Anyway, I want to try something like that app.

I also wake up to the news and gives me weird dreams. Sometimes that gets me out of bed in a "Oh, no, I don't want to hear this" way but not always.

Ha! The app I just downloaded has "evil laugh" for one of the alarm sounds.

I'm setting up a playlist from the Glee soundtrack to try out tomorrow morning.

About the sleep cycle one, I thought the cats might set it off. If this one doesn't work I'll try that one.