my 2gb macbook pro memory ($70) arrived in the mail today. after i installed it, i didn't really notice any sort of speed boost (contrary to speed tests). i just know that if my laptop starts running slow now, it's definitely not because of the memory, which i've now maxed out at 3gb. now that i have all this surplus memory, i'm going to try running windows xp through parallels, see how fast (or slow) that is.

when i woke up today i saw zhu lei getting ready to go biking for the very first time. later i found out that after going to his office, he visited my parents, then went to market basket to get some groceries. i spent the afternoon watching the battlestar galactica: razor pre-release screener. i've sat on it for a while, not sure what was the holdup, because this 2-hour movie/episode is good. BSG continues its tradition of introducing hot crew members and a few shocking revelations are uncovered in razor.

zhu lei came home in the late afternoon, when the sun was already starting to set. he asked me some more questions: where do you go to see a movie? i told him about the various theatres (mainstream versus independent), and how much it costs. i told him about video rental stores, as well as using netflix. i didn't tell him that he could also pull movies from the internet, only because i was selfish and didn't want him to hog my bandwidth (i figured he knew anyway, what young person doesn't know how to download illegal music and movies from the web?). can i get a symphony orchestra discount with my student ID? that kind of surprised me, i didn't peg him as the sort of person who liked classical music, only because i never listen to the stuff myself. we went online to look for ticket prices but i didn't see any discounts. finally, how long does it take to get to boston from philadelphia by train? that's because his girlfriend is coming back up here for thanksgiving weekend (oh joy). i'm not quite sure why he doesn't go down to delaware to visit her instead, but maybe they figured they have it better up here in cambridge, especially considering how i can barely tolerate one stranger living in my house, so having 2 strangers will drive me absolutely crazy. my hope is maybe they'll get together with some of their friends and go someplace else to celebrate thanksgiving. what i'm afraid of is my mother will decide to invite them to our little celebration.

again, i watched the celtics game tonight, versus the new jersey nets. this was their first challenging team of the season but you wouldn't have known it, with the celtics up by 20 points at one point. but a testament to how good the nets are, the celtics starting letting up in the final quarter and new jersey came back to within 7 points. celtics pulled out a victory nevertheless, playing some slow ball in the last few minutes. the celtics are now 5-0 and the only undefeated team in the NBA.

update: i went ahead and installed parallels along with a copy of windows xp pro. the virtual machine only takes up about 2.3gb - i was afraid it was going to partition off a large section of my hard drive, which didn't happen. i could understand running xp inside of an os x windows; i could also understand running xp in full screen mode; what i wasn't prepared for was coherence mode, where xp and os x application windows run together seamlessly. that kind of blew me away, like looking at a weird mac/pc hybrid. the pc did run a little bit slower, but not by much (i also wasn't stressing xp, just surfing some web pages). it's probably not as fast an running xp exclusively through bootcamp, but then again bootcamp can't run both mac and os x. now that i can do xp on my macbook pro, i'm not sure if i'll ever use my desktop pc, since i use it primarily for testing, which can now all be done from my laptop.