Ryanware

Several years ago (3? 4?) I wrote a tiny little Windows application that plays an MP3 file at a specified time of day. That’s all it does. Nothing fancy. You have to select an MP3 file, type the time of day precisely (eg. “6:00 AM”), and check a little checkbox. I’ve opened up to 50 instances of the little app at a time and set them all manually to play some MP3 file at different times to ensure I’ll wake up. It works.

There are many applications out there that do alarms much better than this little thing, but I recently got an email requesting it so I thought I’d share. Heck, notwithstanding all the fancy alarm apps out there I still use this excruciatingly simple thing. The simplest solution isn’t always the best solution, but is often the most used.

Download the self-extracting exe file - 288 KB

Lest the visitors from my sister’s site really believe I’m in love with Microsoft…

It’s really more of a dislike for Mac OS than a liking of Windows. I think Mac OS is ugly. I don’t find Windows particularly fun to look at either, but it does have the benefit of not making me want to puke.

I know it’s all just a matter of personal taste, so all of you Apple fanboys and fangirls can just let me have my personal taste, ok? Thank you. You’re so nice.

So why not Linux? Linux is cool. I’ve used Ubuntu, but as you can see in the right column of this page, I write software for Windows. Well, I should say I used to write software for Windows. I haven’t updated any of that software in a long time. I can’t bring myself to completely abandon the idea of writing more software for Windows though.

The main reason I stick with Windows is because I’m so used to it. I’m not a big fan of getting a system up and running the way I like it, especially when it’s a system I’m not already familiar with such as Linux or Mac OS. As proof, I probably need to reinstall Windows to get rid of junk*, but I don’t because it means I’d have to re-do everything. Yes, I have backups and all that, but if I were to re-do everything I’d want to do some things differently and I just don’t have the time for that.

* The speed of the machine is fine. Really. I don’t know what people do to their Windows machines that makes them run slower over time. People have to re-install Windows every 6 months?! I find that extremely hard to believe and I work my computer as hard as anyone I know. I’ve been running this installation of Windows for over 2 years now and the only time it slows down is when I’ve got gazillions of things open at once. Oh, and as new software comes out that’s been written for newer systems my computer will obviously be slower, but that’s not Windows related.

After 8-10 years of using WinZip, and opening thousands and thousands of archives, and creating hundreds if not thousands of archives I have registered WinZip. That’s right. I actually bought a license.

When I first started using it, I didn’t actually have any money to buy it so I just figured I’d use it until I did. Well, after using it a while one gets used to pressing I agree, Use Evaluation copy, or whatever the button said as the versions changed. I stopped noticing it. This happened with a few other never expiring applications as well (Edit Plus for example, which I finally registered a few months ago).

I no longer have any unregistered and expired software on my computer (that I use anyway, I guess there could be some hiding around that I’ve forgotten about).

:-D