If you’re like me, you tend to press snooze one too many times. Well, it seems some students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (never head of it either) have developed an alarm clock, dubbed the Sfera, that solves this problem:

The clock itself actually hangs from a string, and automatically raises itself a little bit higher off the ground every time you hit snooze, in turn forcing you to actually get up out of bed if you want to turn it off.

Interesting idea, though I can see myself whacking it with a pillow after a while. Maybe it would be better if instead of raising itself up, it shot you with water. That would definitely wake you up!

Read: Engadget

Microsoft just released their latest financial information, and revealed that the division containing Xbox has reported a profit:

Buoyed by strong Xbox sales, The Home and Entertainment unit posted an $84 million profit on revenue of $1.41 billion. A year ago, the unit saw losses of $397 million on sales of $1.27 billion.

Looks good for Xbox2 now!

Read: CNET News.com

I have not met Murphy. I don’t know anyone who has met Murphy. I doubt I’ll ever meet Murphy. But I do know something about Murphy. He’s one aggravating son of a bitch! And if I ever meet him, I’m gonna tell him exactly where to stick his law.

As if they didn’t have enough things in beta already, Google has launched Google Video – a service for searching through TV shows. The results show the title of the show, a brief description, the network, the time, and a screenshot. Here’s a USA Today article on the new search.

I’m stuck up in Edmonton, but at least the weather has been nice! In Seattle for the last two days the Blog Business Summit has been taking place, and they already are planning the next one. You can find out more and fill out their survey here. In the meantime, check out Technorati results and Feedster results for the conference.

According to a U.K. psychologist, today, January 24th, is the worst day of the year:

[Dr. Cliff] Arnall found that, while days technically get longer after Dec. 21, cyclonic weather systems take hold in January, bringing low, dark clouds to Britain. Meanwhile, the majority of people break their healthy resolutions six to seven days into the new year, and even the hangers-on have fallen off the wagon, torn off the nicotine patches and eaten the fridge empty by the third week. Any residual dregs of holiday cheer and family fun have kicked the bucket by Jan. 24.

Hope your day is excellent!

Read: MSNBC

Here’s a story on podcasting from MTV.com. It’s about time they mentioned something!

In less than six months, more than 2,000 podcasters have sprung up, and though [Dave] Winer said it’s hard to measure how many listeners are out there, he thinks the technology is limitless.

In my opinion, that is one of the most important things to know about podcasting – determining exactly how many people are listening is difficult. You can tell how many people subscribe, and maybe even how many download your audio file, but its a different story when you try to find out how many actually listen.

For those of you too young to remember Johnny Carson, like me, here is a good article from the Washington Post about the man everyone seems to love.

More than 22,000 guests appeared on “The Tonight Show” during Johnny Carson’s 30-year tenure as host. That’s enough to fill a couch 8 miles long.

The show was almost always a joy to watch because Carson almost always took great joy in doing it.

And for more, check out the over 1200 stories in Google News.

Just came across Googlewar, very cool tool which lets you enter two queries and it compares the number of results for each in Google. So just to test, I put “mastermaq” against “dickson wong”. And the winner? MasterMaq wins with 13,900 results to 2,210. Owned!

The public beta of eXeem was just released (on the 21st). For those of you who aren’t aware, eXeem is supposed to be the next generation file sharing network from the guys who ran the now defunct SuperNova.org. It builds on top of the BitTorrent network.

I downloaded and installed the beta, and I must say, I am largely unimpressed. The website is terribly slow, the application is terribly slow, and none of my searches returned any results. I understand there are hardly any users on it right now (relatively), so I’ll try searching again another time. The New files tab is kind of neat – shows you the 200 newest files.

Hopefully they continue to work on it, it has potential, but it has a long way to go!