The zero effect have started new recording sessions.

When you start waking up to your roommate singing, loudly and off-key, random selections from the catalogues of The Rentals, Nada Surf and the New Pornographers, it's a good sign that either he has lost his mind, or he has recently gotten an iPod shuffle, or both.

Thursday last it took someone else to push me into finally ordering omakase (the chef's choice) at a sushi restaurant. We ordered it for four, and were brought an approximately three-foot diameter plate with huge chunks of salmon, tuna and yellowtail sashimi, many smaller slices of white tuna and sea bass, various nigiri, large christmas roll and tempura roll, smaller salmon roll, and eel hand rolls. Hot sake accompanied. My roommate's later comment was quite true, that one can enjoy this food more when not having to worry about savoring each piece sufficiently.

Two days later I attended a friend's wedding party for the first time ever, at his house in Scarsdale. It was an "ex post facto" affair, as the coworking couple married on their lunch break five months ago without telling almost anyone, and were only now bringing their families together. We were given a tour of his father's recreation room, which houses a collection of DVD's that he estimates at three thousand, as well as some tapes and laserdiscs. A motorized screen and projector display them. He proudly showed me box sets, twenty-one Laurel and Hardy movies, another involving the name "Camillo" that I'd never heard of. Semi-bootleg editions of lesser known Akira Kurosawa films. It was an offbeat assortment, perhaps because he already had more essential titles on earlier formats. The three-disc Criterion edition of "Brazil" was still in shrink-wrap. I'd been thinking of adjourning my collection at around 500, but how can I now, with what I've seen?

After reading about the Unicorn Tapestries in the New Yorker, I went to see them at the Cloisters. They are pretty incredible in many ways. Seeing their threads up close it was easier to understand the trouble one might get into trying to photograph them in smaller sections. But I do wish the NY could have thrown us some kind of technical-detail-bone as to what sort of equations would be used to iron out the discrepancies. Were they physically modeling the movements of the threads, or examining the colors of the threads to see which ones should line up? Instead we get silly lines like "There were at least a hundred billion numbers in the shopping bags." How many atoms were there? That's probably a crazy big number too! Also, I wonder if anyone else has commented on how much the Chudnovsky brothers sound like the inspiration for the movie "Pi:" they built a supercomputer in their apartment from mail order parts with a frame of plastic pipe and closet racks, and used it to compute two billion digits of Pi with the hope of finding a pattern, and they're a bit weird (one of them has debilitating allergies and they think of themselves as one mathematician inhabiting two bodies).

I've probably previously documented my endless battle with alarm clocks and other devices for waking up. I've scattered them around the room, made a trail of them leading to the shower, had a friend throw cold water on my face, made my computer play incredibly unpleasant sounds, made it play songs. In truth the battle isn't against the alarm clock but against myself, against the alarm clock. My alert self wants a solution that will always get me up in the morning. My just-awakened self is always cleverer and more able in shutting down that solution without waking me up enough for my alert self to take over (sometimes without my ever becoming conscious of what I've done). I think the just-awakened self is actually a part of my brain that is more active during sleep. I know that's not such a new or strange idea. The stranger part is the apparently distinct motivation and reasoning that goes on there.

So far the only progress I make in this battle is when I change up my method and temporarily disorient just-awakened self. This effect tends to last a few days or so. Some recent developments suggest promise toward a more permanent solution. There's MIT's Clocky, which runs away and hides when you hit the snooze. But I can already imagine the devious ways just-awakened self would trap and kill Clocky. Its designer seems to understand pretty well "the foggy logic of our drowsiness." The SleepSmart, which "measures your sleep cycle and waits for you to be in your lightest phase of sleep before rousing you," is a quite different and inspiring angle. Time will tell if this technique can sufficiently weaken just-awakened self's influence on my psyche.

One idea I've had is an extension of the principle of the alarm clock's very nature requiring one to be fully awake to disable it. Working on the assumption that just-awakened self's reasoning powers are weak, one way to accomplish this is to require you to solve a puzzle of some kind. Of course the puzzles have to change every day, preferably not just in detail but in type, so that just-awakened self does not have a chance to get too good at them. A small crossword puzzle one day, a maze the next, a logic puzzle, math problems. This is probably easiest as a software solution. It would need a daily puzzle feed from a web site that offers lots of different types, and a hook up for the air horn to stop when the puzzle has been solved. Then again, it's very tough to make a piece of software that can't be shut down in some way other than intended--I don't think just-awakened self would be above a hard shutdown of the whole computer to achieve its malevolent ends. Turning off the computer speakers would probably do just fine too. So the noisemaker would have to be a separate piece of hardware that can operate independently, and can only be turned off by the proper signal from the computer. In practice this means powered by batteries, no easy access to the battery compartment, and built pretty solidly.

The more elegant hardware solution would be some kind of endlessly configurable puzzle box. But even a Rubik's cube that must be put into different configurations each day would probably only last so long, until I internalize the algorithm enough that just-awakened self can perform it. I don't think I could design anything with enough flexibility, but perhaps someone can. There's also the problem that if I have to configure it myself each night, that might give just-awakened self too much of a head start in the morning in how to solve it.

I know what people will say to this: how about going to bed earlier and getting enough sleep? I don't have a great explanation, but I have tried to do this, and it just doesn't work for me, at least it doesn't last much longer than a typical crazy alarm clock solution. Either I find myself physically unable to go to sleep at the hours necessary, or I can't stand to stop what I'm doing and spend so much time sleeping. So the struggle continues.