¡Qué será será!

Remember your nursery days? How we were made to sing One little, two little, three little Indians and were taught how to count? And how some amused us with little horror stories, like, Hickory dickory dock, three mice ran up the clock, the clock struck one and the others got away with minor injuries? And those that taught us of life and the importance of always being prepared, like, Jack and jill went up the hill to have a little fun, stupid jill forgot the pill and and now they have a son?

Yeah, good old days they were. I particularly remember singing Qué será será, what ever will be will be. Back then the only thing I understood of the rhyme was that it was about a little girl called Sarah. Now don’t laugh, we all have our shares of stupid mistakes.

All of us were kids once, and all kids are stupid

It was not until about a month ago, when I was listening to the Spanish future tense lessons of one of Michel Thomas audio courses, that it finally dawned on me that I’ve been in dark all this time. The verb ser, meaning ‘to be’ in Spanish, becomes será in the third person future tense. So qué será será in fact means what will be will be! Dayum!

Okay, you may have known this from the beginning, perhaps it was only me. But hey, did you know who originally sang Qué será será? And who taught her to speak Spanish? It was Doris Day. First recorded in 1956. And Michel Thomas himself was her Spanish instructor, who taught her how to speak the Spanish accent confidently! I bet you didn’t know that before. It’s okay, coz there are 10,000 ppl learning something for the first time every day according to xkcd. Here’s Doris performing the song, in a movie I couldn’t find the name of:

See how she opens her mouth wide to pronounce ‘será’ confidently?

Michel Thomas

Doris wasn’t the only star to take lessons from Michel Thomas. From Bob Dylan to Jeffrey Archer, his list of clients was quite long. His audio courses and especially his teaching method, known as the Michel Thomas method, have been favorites of language learners all over the world. Born a Jewish boy in Poland, he’d been sent to live in Germany, only to be driven away by Nazies to France, wherein he was finally captured and kept in a Nazi concentration camp. Michel survived, but left for US after learning of his family’s death.

Life in this myriad of cultures had already made him a polyglot. If you’re into languages, his courses can be highly recommended.

And I’ve begun to look back on the nursery rhymes after this. Does Hey diddle diddle, the cat did a piddle have some hidden meaning too?

I Can't Wake Up!

This blog lives. For the past few weeks I’ve been just wandering lonely as a cloud without purpose. Have never had a purpose in life, but it’s struck me like never before lately. Suicide is but a distant option.

No, you just can’t walk away from life.

There are things in life you don’t have a say on and you just have to survive.

Okay, enough drama for the day. 😛

Do you always plan to wake up early and get some work done, but have never been able to actually wake up? Do you always snooze the alarm until it’s really past the hour? Do you simply turn off the alarm and go back to sleep each time? Have you even given up the idea of getting up early just because you know you can’t do that? Do you always say to yourself ‘I can’t wake up!’? If you answered ‘yes’ to any of these questions you’ve come to the right place. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you, I Can’t Wake Up!

Joking aside, I Can’t Wake Up! is the best alarm for android I’ve yet come across. You can make use of several ‘wake up methods’ to make sure you just don’t turn off the alarm and fall back to sleep. Wake up methods aren’t new to the world of alarms. For example I’ve been using Alarm Clock Xtreme Free for more than a year and it had this ‘math to dismiss’ this feature. You have to solve some math problems of a specified skill level if you are to turn the alarm off. I always chose ‘Hardest’ so that I’ll have to turn on the computer to solve them, thus making sure I won’t go back to sleep. But as of late, I became so accustomed to the problems I could just solve them in bed and go back to sleep.

Main screen

Set of available wake up methods

I Can’t Wake Up includes several wake up methods to make sure turning it off ain’t easy. What made me fall for it was the ‘Bar code’ method. Once the alarm goes off, you have to authenticate using one or more barcodes (or QR codes for that matter) to turn it off. Let’s say the barcodes you find in the back covers of books. You first scan the codes in to the app and place a few books in various places of the house at night. In the morning you’ll have to walk to each book, turn on the lights and scan all the codes (which may take a few seconds per code if you’re too sleepy) if you’re to turn off the alarm.

List of bar codes you need to scan to turn off the alarm

Solve all the math problems to turn it off. Mind you, this isn’t the hardest level.

There are a few other alarm apps that make use of the barcode method, but I Can’t Wake Up does it at the best. And it’s feature-packed than any other. Not that it’s perfect. You can’t sort the alarms by time as of yet, and there are ads in the free version. But the pros outweigh the cons.

Wish it had a feature that would only turn the alarm off after I write and publish a post in the blog. Anyway I promise to continue updating the blog every once in a while. Not that anyone cares if I blog or not, but still. So… until then.. back to wandering lonely as a cloud searching for the meaning of life. 😀