We moved into the new building today. It’s awesome.

Posted via web from Kevin Chiu’s Posterous

Last year, I bought 16 oz cup of Alpine Strawberry ice cream from a small eatery across the street from Columbia University, and it changed the way I’ve thought of purchasing this type of good ever since.

As I enjoyed the creamy treat, I realized that I was deriving less and less satisfaction from each additional bite. The effect was so extreme, that as I scooped towards the midpoint of my cup, I found myself annoyed that there was even more ice cream to dig through. And, even though I didn’t want to eat it, I continued eating dutifully to avoid the guilt of wasting food.

When I finally emptied and disposed of the white styrofoam container, I realized that what I was purchasing wasn’t the ice cream, it was enjoyment derived from the experience of eating the ice cream.

The nonlinear relationship expressed on the ice cream store menu suddenly made sense. Larger sizes were disproportionately less expensive when compared using an assumption of a set amount of enjoyment per unit volume, which corresponded to the reality that enjoyment extracted from the ice cream as it was consumed fell over time.

The integral of ice cream enjoyment in reality creates a measured enjoyment that is significantly less than the expected enjoyment estimated using the misguided assumption that there is a direct correlation between enjoyment and volume. Additionally, there are further negative enjoyment effects, such as an expanding waistline, to be taken into consideration.

Purchases of things that temporarily improve your life at the cost of future well being should be avoided.

1. Ars Technica – Very high quality stories, but slower to respond to breaking news.
2. Engadget – Gadget blog – arch rival of Gizmodo
3. Gizmodo – Gadget blog – arch rival of Engadget
4. Lifehacker – Random life tips
5. MacRumors – Mac Rumors (of course)
6. Slashdot – An old standby that I temporarily left for Digg.
7. TechCrunch – A rather famous tech blog – more like a newspaper

My new MacBook Pro 13″ arrived today! Woohoo! Unfortunately, the psychologist in me has assigned the joy of opening the new package to be the reward for finishing everything on today’s TODO list.

Update: Opened it. Woohoo!.

Check out the WWDC stream.

Here are some highlights + my immediate thoughts.

• Snow Leopard and its major new tech features: 64-bit-ness (speed), Grand Central (speed), OpenCL (speed), and Exchange support. Why is Exchange cool? Google’s services speak Exchange; so, it’ll be possible to have a fully integrated Exchange solution without any Microsoft products! Bad news for MS unless they’re licensing out the Exchange protocols, which I suspect they are.
• Macbook Pro 13″ (Uni 13) – the Alu 12″ lives on! I’ve just purchased the 2.26 ghz base configuration to replace my first gen Alu 15. I opted to use the student discount instead of the developer discount, providing me with a free iPod touch, which is worth ~$230, way more than the additional discount from the ADC program. I have my upgrades planned as well. A ~$60 2×2GB pair is already the mail from Crucial, and later this summer, I’ll consider getting either the Corsair 256GB SSD or 128, depending on how much prices fall on the superior Samsung-controlled parts and how much I can tease out of eBay for the free iPod.
• iPhone 3GS – the camera is finally decent!

If you’ve ever wondered how to synchronize iCal with Google calendar, well, here’s how.

You can use this to synchronize calendars across multiple computers. Just sync up each one with the same Google calendar and you’re set. Any item created at one computer will transfer to the others.

Now, I’ve discovered how to use email aliases that I’ve previously set up using Gmail.

When setting up your mail account on the phone, use the “Other” account option. I suggest selecting the IMAP toggle. Then enter the email address you want to use and fill out all the other information using your Gmail info.

To add an additional alias, create another account of type “Other.”

1. Select POP mail, and enter the address you would like to use as the alias.
2. Under the incoming mail option, put in a single character for each field. (These can be optionally removed later.)
3. For outgoing mail, enter your Gmail info.

What this does is set up one account that can sync with your Gmail, and multiple additional accounts that can only send through your Gmail SMTP account.

When you send mail, you should now see an additional “From:” field, where you can choose your alias.

The takeaway:

• There are three rails.
• The two uncovered rails are ground.
• The rail with the wooden cover is high voltage: 650 volts. It’s called the Third Rail.
• The train uses an electrical contact called the Shoe to connect to the Third Rail.
• Trains wear the rails and produce rail dust, which can easily create a path to ground from nearly any object. So don’t even get near the Third Rail.

He heard the music for the Space Needle New Year’s celebration and came to the logical conclusion that it was Star Wars Day!