Evidence does indeed confirm that people adjust to both positive and negative changes in circumstances with surprising speed, and then promptly forget that they did so…Thus we find ourselves on a hedonic treadmill in which we strive for an imagined happiness that forever slips out of our grasp, beckoning us onward…

I’ve been trying to get out of the house more on weekends to do homework, but I’m starting to find that that ambient noise at coffee shops drives me crazy. Either I can hear individual conversations too easily (yesterday I was sitting near two people who appeared to be on a first date), or the refrigerator/background music/coffee grinder is too loud.

Also, the right side of the palm rest on my laptop has reached new levels of flex-y squeakiness. I think I am going to have to try to add some padding to the bottom of it to make it stop. I can’t believe how much Thinkpad build quality has degraded.

that doesn’t involve me refraining from licking my lips or breathing with my mouth open?

TXTING COSTS R $£&+%$*&!:

“The maximum size for a text message is 160 characters, which takes 140 bytes because there are only 7 bits per character in the text messaging system, and we assume the average price for a text message is 5p. There are 1,048,576 bytes in a megabyte, so that’s 1 million/140 = 7490 text messages to transmit one megabyte. At 5p each, that’s £374.49 per MB – or about 4.4 times more expensive than the ‘most pessimistic’ estimate for Hubble Space Telescope transmission costs.”

Text Messaging is the Biggest Scam of the 21st Century:

$800/GB is what the world record holder is able to get. If you use a different text messaging plan or none at all the cost is higher still: 1500 at $15/month = $75,000/GB
200 at $5/month = $192,307/GB
Non-plan per message = $1,533,742/GB at $0.20 per message

I lasted exactly 1 month as a smartphone owner before caving in and buying a data plan. It more than doubles my monthly cell phone bill, which is depressing…but on the up side, now I can ditch my text messaging plan by using my Google Voice number.

The Google Voice app for Android suspiciously doesn’t have push notifications, but the Gmail app does and you can easily forward GV texts to your Gmail account and then receive and reply to texts within Gmail. It’s not optimal, because when I do actually open up Google Voice it can’t tell that I’ve already read messages in Gmail. But for now it’s fine. Hopefully push notifications (and maybe an option to switch to white-on-black text) will come in an update soon, just like pinch-to-zoom did.