This episode shows precisely why non-geeks think that geeks are weird, while giving us geeks a nice warm glow.

Yes, you could buy an alarm clock for pennies, but where would the fun and sense of achievement be in that?

I once found myself in a hotel room without my phone or any other kind of alarm. I HAD to be up early to make an important meeting. My solution was to create a simple MS Access application (it was a company laptop) to poll the system clock until it reached 0530, then just repeatedly trigger the "beep". It took all of 5 minutes to code and test.