I'm not a morning person by default. Life claims otherwise, though, so I've had to figure out how to wake up at a reasonable hour. Which is even more difficult when you throw in a little jet lag.

I play the typical games of setting my alarm 9, 18, or 27 minutes earlier than my target wake time. This gives me at least 1, 2 or 3 snooze cycles before having to drag my self out from the warm embrace of sleep.

Though, I'm amazed at how efficiently my sleep can adjust to a regular 9 minute interruption, and blow right on past my target wake time.

At best, I'm 9 minutes late. Sometimes it's more like 27.

I use my iPhone as my alarm clock, docked next to the bed. Thankfully, it allows for multiple alarms. I've now taken to setting my typical N-snooze alarm, to gently ease me towards getting up. But now I also set a secondary backup alarm a mere two minutes after I really want to be awake.

By breaking the 9 minute cycle, the quick secondary alarm is like your mother standing over you, not letting you sleep the day away.

When the 2-after alarm goes off, my mind registers that I'm "late" since it's after the target time, but I'm not panicked since I'm not that late. Yet.

This is what I do to most successfully get up around 7am.

I'm a huge fan of Tempur-Pedic beds. You know, the original Swedish sleep system using the Tempur(tm) material developed for NASA.

I'm just wondering how the Swedes infiltrated our space program to steal NASA's space-age bedding technology, and why we let them get away with it.

The fate of our nation's rest, and maybe our entire space exploration program, is in the hands of quite possibly angry Scandinavians.

It's not like we don't know where Sweden is. We could quite easily go retrieve our revolutionary sleep technology and re-secure our future in the space race.

This is a fantastic idea.

It's an alarm clock in the form of a pig's head. It is no ordinary pig-head-shaped alarm clock, though. Instead of buzzing, it gently wakes you up by delivering some hot and delicious bacon to you.

Bacon!

How can that be wrong?

It's basically just an alarm clock that has had the buzzer re-routed to some halogen lamps that pull an Easy-Bake on the bacon. Or course, you'll need the matching Sleep-and-Freeze to store your spare frozen bacon rounds, ready for loading each night.

I imagine the vegetarian model, which tosses a salad, will be significantly less successful in waking people up.