So I see on LJ that quite a few people on my friends list stayed up very late last night to watch the US election results come in.

I didn't; I went to bed as usual, and checked the result on the web when I got up (admittedly half an hour early) this morning. This is generally what I do with elections in my own country, too. My stated reason for this yesterday was that whatever the result turned out to be, I couldn't imagine my attitude to it today being improved by sleep deprivation. Other people responded that the sense of suspense would prevent them from getting to sleep until they knew the result. I thought, at the time, that I must simply not be feeling the suspense in the same way.

However, I think that in fact that wasn't the answer. What it was is that I did want to know what the result was – so I didn't want to spend several more hours of subjective time waiting to find out! By falling asleep, I got to effectively skip ahead to the bit where I find out who did it, instead of having to plod through the intervening pages one by one.

Occasionally I will see somebody post something – on LJ, Usenet, Monochrome, wherever – and think ‘ah, I have something useful to say in response to that’. So I'll start writing a response, and part way through writing it I will realise that it's coming out as complete drivel: what seemed like sensible and relevant points when they sprang into my mind on reading the post in fact look rather less relevant, or less coherent, or both, when I write them down. So I decide I can't make a useful contribution after all, abandon my half-written reply, and go on my way.

That's all fair enough. But often what happens is that I later have another look at the original post, and in spite of my previous failed attempt to post a response, I find myself thinking ‘no, look, that stuff I wanted to post really is useful and relevant and I should post it’. So I try again, and the same thing happens. And then, the next time the original post crosses my line of sight, I go through the same cycle again.

That annoys me. Why can't the two parts of my brain talk to each other, reach some sort of synthesis, and stop alternately bombarding my top-level consciousness with their conflicting opinions? Gaah.

I bought two books the other week which, slightly to my surprise, turned out to be isomorphic.

The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is an alternate history novel depicting what might have happened if Europe had been wiped out by plague at some point around the end of the first millennium, and the various cultures east of there – China, India, the Arabs – had expanded into the space, discovered America, and written the history books their way instead of ours. The story spans a period of time orders of magnitude longer than the lifetime of any individual character, and is told as a sequence of connected short stories in which the characters of each one have some sort of connection to the characters in the last (because they're reincarnations of the previous lot in accordance with an appropriately generically-Eastern theology).

Evolution, by Stephen Baxter, is a novel dramatising the evolution of humanity, starting at small ratlike mammals just before the dinosaur extinction and continuing aeons past the present day into what Earth might look like after humanity as we recognise it is long gone. The story spans a period of time orders of magnitude longer than the lifetime of any individual character, and is told as a sequence of connected short stories in which the characters of each one have some sort of connection to the characters in the last (because they're their descendants, hundreds or thousands of generations later and considerably evolved).

This isn't a criticism; both are perfectly good books, they're very different in every detail beneath that basic structural similarity, and there is certainly room in the world for both of them. But it struck me as an entertaining coincidence that I happened to pick them both up during the same trawl of a charity shop. I wonder if the same person donated both of them for the same reason!

$ echo "long long x;" > z.c
$ gcc --std=c99 -pedantic -Wall -c z.c
$ gcc --std=c90 -pedantic -Wall -c z.c
cc1: error: unrecognized command line option "-std=c90"
$ gcc --std=c89 -pedantic -Wall -c z.c
z.c:1: warning: ISO C90 does not support `long long'

Hmm. Nothing like clear consensus on standards nomenclature.

Back in the office today, after two weeks off. In those two weeks I've managed to do several almost useful things, which is unusual.

I've finally got hold of a gluten-free bread recipe which I'm actually willing to eat for pleasure rather than just using it as breadcrumbs. As a result I've spent most of the last two weeks methodically going through everything I can think of to eat on toast, and eating it on toast.

I've also advanced the remains of my house-sorting-out list, by acquiring a bookcase for my DVDs and hence removing them from their previous location in an unsightly and inconvenient pile in the corner of the dining room floor. This took some work. After searching various furniture shops (both online and off) for the right sort of wall-mounted bookcases, I eventually resorted to Dad's carpentry skills to get a custom bookcase built for me. So last week I went down to visit him for a couple of days (at his suggestion) with the plan that we'd build a bookcase together in his garage. In fact, ‘building it together’ turned out to mean that I mostly held one end of something while he bashed nails into the other end, but I took careful notes throughout the procedure in the hope that I might be able to at least try to build a similar sort of thing myself should I ever need to. Then I brought the newly assembled bookcase home, where I had to varnish it myself and wait another couple of days while two coats of varnish dried, then I screwed it to the wall on Saturday and filled it with DVDs. I'm unreasonably pleased with the result given how little of the work I actually did.

Aside from those, there was some geeking (some useful, some potentially profitable, some thoroughly silly) and some helping of other people get useful things done. I feel almost entirely satisfied with the way my holiday has gone, apart from the fact that I feel somewhat tired now it's over!

Is it just me, or does cheese taste noticeably better when you have previously grated part of the block and are now eating the part with the grated-from surface?

My guess is that (if I'm not just imagining it) it's a surface-area thing. If so, I wonder if there's a market for weird specialist cheese knives that leave a highly uneven surface every time they cut.

It's not unheard of for people forced to get up early in the morning to describe it as ‘ungodly’ when grumbling about it, as in ‘*yawn* why do I have to get up at this ungodly hour?’.

It occurred to me, in a silly moment a few months ago, to idly wonder if that phrase has only ever been used as hyperbole, or if there might ever have been a real religion which considered the early morning to be genuinely and literally ungodly. Some sort of breakaway Christian subsect, perhaps, who hold that not only did God have a bit of a rest on the seventh day but he also didn't get out of bed until nearly noon on the previous six. The keystone of your worship as a member of that sect, naturally, would be what you did on a Sunday morning – you'd stay in bed, with great reverence and solemnity, and cry sacrilege and blasphemy at any miserable heretic who dared try to make you get up.

In an unrelated conversation with atreic recently, she made the lighthearted suggestion that perhaps the main benefit of humanity having achieved sentience was that it conferred the ability to properly appreciate the pleasurable nature of sleep, as a contrast to all that thinking.

Suddenly I realised that my fictional sleep-obsessed religion had met its nemesis: atreic's line of thinking there would clearly be its evolutionist counterpart, its personal sleep-obsessed Richard Dawkins! In a world containing both, there'd be huge philosophical debates all over the national media about whether sleep was great because it was God's grand plan or because it was the pinnacle of human evolution.

But it would be noticeable, to anyone paying attention, that no cut or thrust in the ongoing public debate on the subject ever took place before two in the afternoon at the earliest. :-)

At some point last week, while the Olympics were on TV, there was a five-minute segment mentioning that although China was at the top of the medals table by the IOC's official ranking, the USA's internal news services all put it at the top of the table – because the IOC likes to count gold medals and use the others to break ties, whereas the USA prefers to count total medals first and break ties by means of how many of them are which colour. (It was claimed that the USA has always counted this way, and that it was pure happenstance that on this occasion it happened to be a method of counting which put it at the top.)

So, just out of interest, I've prepared an alternative view of the final medals table for the 2008 Olympics, which simply does not take sides in debates of this sort: it shows which countries must be considered to have got a better medal haul than which other countries by any sensible ranking policy, and doesn't try to make arbitrary judgments between the rest.

http://tartarus.org/simon/2008-olympics-hasse/

I'm slightly surprised at how that turned out; I'd have guessed there'd be at least a few more unambiguous pinch points. As it is, the only countries in the entire table which can be sure of their position in the ranking are Russia, Great Britain, and the group at the bottom with one bronze medal each.

My Leatherman is beginning to get long in the tooth. (Specifically, and somewhat unimpressively, its pliers now don't open and close properly, due to protruding nicks on the wire cutters which I apparently caused recently by using them to cut wire.) What multi-tool should I replace it with?

My current one is the long-defunct Leatherman Flair, which I bought because it was a Leatherman-type tool but also had a corkscrew and bottle opener; I thought, and still think, that this seemed like a generally useful combination. The Flair also has two other ‘picnic accessories’ which are completely pointless (a spreader and a cocktail fork, for goodness' sake), but it includes a blade, pliers, scissors, a useful range of screwdrivers and assorted booze-opening technology in one convenient package, and that's all been consistently useful to me for years.

If I could design a new multitool myself from scratch I'd leave out the silly picnic accessories, add a few more screwdrivers, have the tools fold out from the outside rather than the inside, and probably make the knife blade much smaller. (My own best judgment says the Flair isn't in violation of UK knife-carrying legislation, but on the other hand I don't actually need a blade longer than a couple of centimetres since I only really use it for opening packaging; so if I were designing from scratch I'd play it a lot safer.) Oh yes, and I'd make the wire cutters out of pure adamantium, bah.

But it isn't feasible to design one's own multitool from the ground up, so I probably want to buy some reasonably good approximation to the above. I've done a bit of googling, but nothing has really stood out for me as being obviously what I want. Any satisfied users out here with personal recommendations?

I had an odd email this weekend. Someone mailed me about a couple of minor points on my website, and then added at the end of the message that he found it curious that I hadn't written anything about religion. He said, in particular, that he thought knowing something about what I believed in that area might, in his words, ‘shed some light on an important aspect of [my] personality’.

Well, I was willing enough to answer his question in private email. It's true that I've never bothered to mention on my main website that I'm an atheist, but that's not out of any strong feeling that it's Nobody Else's Business; partly it's because I'd expect any such mention to attract too much email flamage to be worth the trouble, but mostly I've just never felt that I had anything particularly interesting or original to say on the subject. (And if I did, it would more likely be a vague musing to mention in passing in this diary, rather than something to publish on my permanent website as a Serious Essay intended to attract ongoing widespread interest.)

But it struck me as particularly strange that someone might feel their understanding of me as a person was noticeably incomplete without knowing my religion. I mean, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find there are people whose religion is responsible for significant aspects of their personality (e.g. if their personality changed noticeably when they converted). And I certainly know there are people who at least believe their religion is the most important thing about them: I occasionally come across LJ bios saying faintly nauseating things like ‘The most important fact about me is that I love God’, or ‘I'm a Fooist, and once you know that, you know everything you need to about me’. (My general feeling tends to be that if they say everything else about them is even less interesting than their religion, I'm willing to take their word for it.)

But it's always seemed to me that such people are a small minority: for the most part I wouldn't have said there was any particularly noticeable divide of personality between the various theists and atheists I know. So when I meet somebody new, I've never felt a particular need to know about their religion, beyond finding out whether or not they're the sort of person who makes an overwhelmingly big deal of it. Sometimes I've managed to know people for years before finding out that they've been a devout Fooist all along and I'd never known – and once I've blinked a couple of times, it generally alters my attitude to them not one jot.

Am I unusual in this? Does anyone else round here feel that their understanding of someone's personality is necessarily (or even usually) incomplete without some knowledge of their attitude to religion?

A thing that irregularly irritates me about my brain is that it appears to have different algorithms for answering the questions ‘where should I look for X?’ and ‘where should I put X so that I'll know where to find it next time?’.

The usual illustration of this is that I lose something, and after searching everywhere decide I'd better give up looking and buy a new one. When I get the new one, I try to think of somewhere good to put it so I'll be sure of being able to find it next time – and the place I decide on is often somewhere I hadn't yet looked for the old one, and guess what I find there when I do?

My brain doesn't seem to want to make it easy to solve this problem, because its where-should-I-put-this algorithm doesn't like being invoked counterfactually. If I pretend I've just bought a new one and ask myself where I should put it, I'm likely to get the same set of answers as I did from the where-should-I-look-for-it algorithm; it's only when I've really just bought a new one that the real where-should-I-put-it algorithm activates and I'm able to frustratingly find the old one after all.

It's terribly annoying and I wish it would stop it. Bah.

My electricity supplier, on the bills they send me, annotate every meter reading as ‘read by you’ or ‘read by us’, presumably so that if the readings are ever non-monotonic or otherwise unbelievable they know which ones to question.

Last week they stuck a card through my door telling me that they'd tried to read my meter but I hadn't been in (since, just like every other company in the multiverse that visits people at home in the course of its business, they invariably attempt to do so at the most likely times of day for the occupants to be out at work). My previous supplier's suggested fallback procedure in this situation was for me to read the meter myself and give them the readings either by phone or through their website. This lot prefer me to fill in the meter readings on the card itself, and to leave the card in my window so they can see it when they call back.

So I did that, and today I got the resulting bill. The meter readings are exactly the ones I wrote on the card, but they're annotated ‘read by us’! I wonder if that meter reading is now tagged as trustworthy in their database despite them not having laid eyes on the actual meter at any point.

Vampires don't have reflections; everybody knows that. But how do they not have reflections? What's the mechanism? And what useful applications are there for that mechanism?

I think it goes like this. When a photon strikes a vampire, it separates into two different types of semiphoton, which I'm going to call an R-photon and an S-photon. The R-photon continues along the original photon's path, as if the vampire hadn't been there; R-photons disappear if they touch a sensor (such as an eye, or a camera), but if they touch a reflective object they reflect off it and turn back into ordinary photons. (Most noticeable with a mirror, but I think it applies to diffuse reflection off ordinary surfaces too.) The S-photon, meanwhile, reflects off the vampire as if it had been an ordinary body; S-photons disappear if they touch a reflective surface (again, ordinary diffuse surfaces as well as mirrors), but things like the photoelectric effect work just fine, so S-photons interact with sensors exactly like normal photons do.

Hence, if you're in the room with a vampire, you see it by means of the S-photons scattering off it; but if you look in the mirror, you don't see the reflections of the S-photons, but only those of the R-photons which went straight through the vampire.

There are a couple of fiddly corner cases: what happens if the first object struck by an R- or an S-photon is another vampire? After drawing a thought-experiment diagram or two on paper, I conclude that R-photons go straight through additional vampires and remain R-photons only, while S-photons bounce off vampires and remain S-photons only. Any other behaviour would sometimes enable you to see a vampire in a mirror, by putting another vampire either between the first one and the light or between the first one and the mirror.

So now we have a sound theoretical basis for the optical behaviour of vampires, what are its applications? Well, distressingly, no application I've been able to think of quite works.

You'd like to be able to use a wide flat vampire as a one-way wall: angle a mirror at the wall and you can see through the vampire as if it wasn't there, but people on the other side don't know you're watching. Except that doesn't work if they have mirrors too, and in a world where people used this as a means of covert surveillance, anyone remotely paranoid would have a small mirror about their person at all times.

A vampire itself would have the useful ability to wear a pair of glasses with one lens mirrored on the inside, and thus be able to see people sneaking up behind it with stakes. Unfortunately, a vampire so equipped would no longer be entirely invisible in mirrors – there'd be a mirrored lens hovering in mid-air. I'm sure that would turn out to be inconvenient.

A superficially impressive military application requires a vampire which itself has a mirror finish. If you take a laser beam and reflect it off a vampire, you split it into an R-laser and an S-laser. The R-laser is useless as far as I can see, but the S-laser has definite possibilities: it has the same effect on a target as ordinary laser weapons, but without the risk of mirror-carrying enemies reflecting it back at you. Except that even that doesn't work, because vampires reflect S-photons; so if the enemy also has a mirror-polished vampire, they can use that to send your beam back at you. Arrgh!

You'd also have to avoid using a laser working in the ultraviolet frequency range, or else your vampire would develop a completely different optical problem…

(Thanks to several people in the pub for helping me discuss this very silly idea :-)

I fell asleep last night and dreamed the most fabulously complicated heist movie. Together with a couple of confederates, I had visited Russia in the Soviet era and begun to put into motion an unbelievably intricate and fragile plan to steal state secrets from KGB headquarters. (Under normal circumstances that'd have made it a spy movie, but for some reason my dream cortex decided to do it in heist-movie style instead.) There was a lot of stuff along the lines of making multiple visits to the HQ disguised as different workmen, and drilling holes in just the right places so that eventually there'd be a bunch of holes in walls lined up in a perfectly straight line reaching from a sensitive interior room to the outdoors.

The preparation stage had been going on for hours of dream-time and was nearly finished … when, to my utter frustration, I woke up, and was unable to resume the dream when I went back to sleep. Arrgh! I really wanted to know what those lined-up holes (and all the other similarly complex bits and pieces) were going to be used for. Now I feel as if I wasted all that time.

I drove down to London yesterday to visit my sister, who lives in the general vicinity of Wandsworth. Normally I'd use a more sensible mode of transport, but on this occasion the point of the trip was to bring some bulky stuff back to Cambridge for Mum to look after while Sophie's away in New Zealand.

I hate driving in London. Every time I do it, I vow never again, and someone always manages to talk me into it regardless. Still, I might as well keep trying. Never again!

When I first started driving, I had an absolute terror of London, because I'd heard so many awful things about London drivers. Driving around the M25 was fine, but I had a lifetime ambition never to take my car inside the region it enclosed if I could possibly help it.

I think I first broke that ambition by accident, by missing my turning off the M11. That was OK; I just turned round at the first opportunity and hastily went back, and it was still just ordinary motorway and roundabouts. Then I visited somebody only just inside the M25 on the north side (Enfield or thereabouts, if I remember rightly), and that didn't seem obviously scarier than outside.

With my confidence thus boosted, I made a couple of trips to places on or around the North Circular, and then one to the Isle of Dogs. That was where it started to get irritating, not because of the feared London drivers but because the road layout policy in London is alien to all my non-London experience and I can never predict what the lane system is going to do next. The last time I went, I had drswirly in the passenger seat being a full-time navigator and we still managed to take several wrong turnings and end up both thoroughly infuriated with the wretched city's road designers. ‘Let's never come here again,’ said Gareth. If only. Still, it seemed like an improvement to avoid London out of annoyance with the road layout than from terror of the danger to life and limb from the sinister phantom of the London Driver.

So yesterday I ventured into Wandsworth by way of the M4 and the South Circular. On the way in, again, I had a full-time navigator in the passenger seat, and apart from an easily corrected wrong turn in a one-way system five minutes from our destination, we got the whole journey done with only a constant background level of annoyance at the lane system: the road kept dividing into two lanes and back again for no very clear reason.

On the way out again, my navigator was missing: Mum didn't need to be back in Cambridge as early as I did, so she'd decided to stay a bit longer and take the train home, leaving me to drive all the bulky luggage home on my own. I wasn't too worried by this: getting out of big cities is always easier than getting in, because there are always lots of signs pointing to the motorways.

It went fine until I was nearly back to the M4, at which point I took a wrong turn at a roundabout because the right turning had no confirming sign. In retrospect, actually, it did: it had a sign after the turning, pointing back the way I'd come saying ‘this is where you should have gone just now’. The spiralling lanes didn't permit me to go all the way round and try again, so I ended up heading off in the wrong direction, and then decided to take my life in my hands by trying to find my way back to that roundabout without stopping to look at a map.

It worked, but only just. I turned off the random A-road I was on, and attempted to head back in the right general direction by counting my turns and hoping to hell all the turns were good enough approximations to right angles. Just as I'd lost count, I found myself at a crossroads in the middle of Chiswick which apparently hadn't heard of the idea that signposting the major motorways is helpful. Fortunately, I noticed a little brown sign pointing to ‘Brentford Fountain Leisure Centre’, and in a feat of memory which I'm still feeling smug about the next day I recognised that as the name printed on a building we'd driven quickly past on the way in to London five hours earlier. So I headed in that direction, and was right to do so; within minutes I saw the roundabout ahead, took the right exit this time, and was on my way home with no further mishap.

So I was pretty pleased with myself for managing to get myself out of that, but pretty irritated with London for requiring me to have that good a memory!

Also, this time, the real London drivers finally did make an appearance. I think they must have observed the same indecisive lane markings as me and drawn the conclusion that they were probably only advisory; so they kept treating ordinary one-lane-each-way roads as if they had two lanes, and overtaking me on the inside at moments that had me shaking my head and wondering how anyone who did that on a regular basis was still alive. Fortunately my driving experience to date had left me with good instincts for spotting someone about to undertake me and a good reflex response to start behaving especially predictably as soon as I notice anyone else doing something weird, and those kept me out of serious danger. I still felt like a herbivore among apex predators, though, and was very glad to get out of there.

Let's try this one more time. Never again!

It is a lifetime ambition of mine that one day I may hear someone utter the phrase ‘It's cold outside’ and not immediately have my brain start playing the Red Dwarf theme to itself on repeat.

There's a large class of global optimisation algorithms which share a common dynamic-programming sort of approach.

( this one is serious geek material )

So because these things keep coming up, and in particular because I keep finding applications of the same principle to solve problems I'm faced with, I would like there to be a piece of terminology that precisely describes this particular optimisation strategy.

‘Dynamic programming’ is of course an umbrella term which covers all of the above. But it's too general: it also describes other types of algorithm which don't fit into this specific framework. I want a word for this specific shape of dynamic programming algorithm. The best I currently have is ‘Viterbi-like’, and that's useless because even I wouldn't have known what it meant until a couple of years ago.

Suppose you have a thing which you're comparing to another thing. (Whatever they might be. Consumer products, pieces of software, business models, algorithms, I don't care.) Suppose there are a number of criteria on which you might compare the two things, so that there are two ways in which the comparison might be inconclusive: as well as ‘they're both the same’ the answer might be ‘better in some ways, worse in others’.

The thing I keep finding I need a word for is the situation where neither of these is the case: where one of the things is better in at least some ways, and although they might be exactly tied in other ways there is no way in which it is worse. This is the point at which it typically becomes a no-brainer to throw away the other thing and adopt the better one, whereas in any other situation you might hesitate for fear that one of the ways in which the new thing is worse might turn out to be the most important criterion.

I've heard people use – and found myself unconsciously using – a lot of different words for this, but none ever seems quite right. ‘Uniformly superior’ isn't right, because often it's not actually superior in every single way: merely superior in some and equivalent in others. ‘Linearly superior’ is one I've heard a surprising number of times, and it always seems to make sense in context, but when you look at it more carefully there isn't the remotest connection between this concept and any of the usual meanings of ‘linear’. ‘Unconditionally superior’ is one of the better ones, suggesting that its superiority is not conditional on the relative importance to you of the various criteria, but again it has a bit of the ‘uniformly’ problem, in that if one doesn't pay attention it's easy to read it as suggesting that the thing is actually better in all ways.

In mathematics, there is a precise term which means what I want: ‘greater in the product order’. (A product order is one possible way of combining many individually comparable quantities to produce an overall comparison of the lot, and it states that one list of quantities is greater or equal to another list if and only if each individual quantity in the first list is greater or equal than its counterpart in the second. So, ‘greater or equal in the product order’ means that the thing is at least as good on every criterion, and ruling out the ‘or equal’ clause means that there's at least one criterion on which it's actually better.) However, on the rare occasions that I've tried using this phrase for this purpose it has confused even other mathematically trained people.

I'm sure there ought to be a sensible and widely understood phrase for this concept, because I find myself needing to use it so often.

Pedant points:

• Use common sense as necessary for borderline or ambiguous cases
• Use your own judgment as to what reasonably counts as ‘often’
• By ‘music-playing equipment’ I mean equipment for playing recorded music; musical instruments are outside the scope of this poll
• Devices which can play music but are not specifically intended for so doing (e.g. a computer that just happens to have a sound card) should be considered music-playing devices if you ever play music on them; otherwise make your own judgment.

My plan to buy a Chumby and convert it into a somewhat over-engineered alarm clock has now come to full fruition, and appears to have been entirely successful.

I had to junk the original version of the software I wrote for it, because it turned out that the Chumby's Flash player was apparently never intended to keep running the same program for more than a few minutes at a time: every three days or so it would leak enough memory that the clock became unresponsive and had to be rebooted. So I threw the whole thing away, thus fulfilling Brooks' Nth Law, and wrote it again from scratch in C. It is now lovely and fast, it doesn't leak, and as an added bonus it's much easier to persuade it to store persistent data and make network connections.

So the clock program now does everything I originally envisaged, including tying in over the network to my existing calendar software. Yesterday was the first test of this on live data: it correctly spotted the impending bank holiday and automatically cancelled the usual weekday alarm arrangements, and it has correctly not tried to do the same thing again for tonight. Success!

So now it's working, the real question is: was it worth it? And already I'm confident that the answer is yes.

As I originally planned, I can now get up early with impunity. I can just press ALARM OFF, get out of bed, and not worry about it. Where I would previously have had to come back to the clock at 8am to stop it beeping, or remember to turn the alarm back on properly that night, I now need do nothing at all – and on the next school night, it's lit up just as it usually would be, reminding me to enable the alarm for the next morning. One irritating little weight off my mind.

But there's an additional advantage which I hadn't considered, which revolves around the snooze function. With my previous clock's snooze function, you would press the Snooze button and then be pretty much committed (on pain of thundering inconvenience if you go back on it) to staying in bed for another nine minutes. So you might as well drift back off to sleep, and then when the alarm goes bwarp again nine minutes later you're just as unwilling to get up as you were the first time.

But with my snooze function, because you can trivially cancel it at any time in the middle of the snooze interval, it's now feasible to lie in bed and gradually wake up rather than going straight back to sleep; my normal usage of the snooze function is now to hit Snooze, lie around for three or four minutes, then cancel the snooze and get up. The alarm at the end of the snooze period has now become a safety feature just in case I accidentally drift back off during this process; in normal usage it never actually goes off. It's as if my redesign has completely changed the nature of what the snooze function is fundamentally for, and the new model feels much more sensible and useful. (Of course the old usage is still available if I should want it: there's nothing stopping me hitting the snooze button and dozing straight back off).

There's always a danger, when you want something for ages and finally get it, that it will turn out not to be as good as you'd hoped, or that your imagination had not correctly envisaged the way it would be used and that it will therefore turn out not to be as useful as you had believed. Today I own an alarm clock which has well and truly avoided these traps, by not only fulfilling all my original expectations but also by turning out to be useful in extra ways. I got it right!