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.

“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.

In the library I have been asking people sitting near me to watch my stuff, although I’m not sure whether all I get out of that is a false sense of security.

Also, why doesn’t AT&T give their wireless customers free internet access at Starbucks like they do with their wifi customers?

Went on the SOCHI ski trip, got stuck in a chairlift, crashed into another person and fell getting off a chairlift, lost a ski getting on a chairlift and then fell again trying to get off with one ski, took at least a full 5 minutes to figure out that you have to unlock your skis when they come off in order to pop yourself back in again, failed exert any control over my speed during the last 1/3 part of every single run, kind of learned how to skate, and had a lot of fun.