my upstairs neighbors are doing some sort of home improvement work in their kitchen. i know this because my bedroom is exactly right below the action and this morning i could hear - no feel - the vibration from the drilling. later during the day some guys with ladder were doing something to the house, and then something to the wiring outside. it's all very mysterious and normally i wouldn't even care except i noticed my cable reception is all screwed up ever since their visit. i'm getting serious interference on all my lower channels, like maybe they accidently wired something wrong. i wrote my neighbors a note asking for details, and whether or not they were experiencing the same thing. it's only a handful of channels but it bothers me to no end knowing that i'm getting crappy cable reception when i didn't used to.

late last night i installed 10.5 leopard on my macbook pro, after playing with a test version off of an external firewire drive. there was a tense moment when the installer seemed to have stalled. i was ready to try again, resigned to the fact that now i'll have a partially installed version that won't even boot up properly. i even went as far as the startup disk panel to pick another drive before i had a change of heart. glad i hesitated, because there wasn't anything wrong with the installer, it's just slow.

my reactions? boot time in leopard is really slow compared to tiger. i've heard all these glowing reports about how leopard is supposed to be faster, but it takes 40 seconds for me to boot up into the desktop, and then another 30 seconds for my startup applications to load (ichat, mail, safari). i don't know why it's this slow, probably has something to do with the fact that this wasn't a fresh install, but instead an upgrade from 10.4.11. if i feel brave enough i might back up all my data and do a clean install when i have more time. for the most part the experience on my macbook pro was just like when i was playing with the new system off of the firewire drive: disconcerting transparent menubar, non-intuitive ugly new folder icons, etc. maybe it was my imagination, but applications did seem to open up faster, with more of a zip. i noticed a weird font issue in safari, where helvetica text was being rendered with helvetica narrow. i found somebody online with a similar problem and i fixed it by trashing all my custom fonts (including helvetica narrow). the system seemed stable enough, and most of my programs work for the most part. however, i managed to crash the system twice when i was running a java applet and lost my internet connection. as soon as reset my router, my macbook would experience a sudden kernel panic forcing me to restart the machine. not sure why that is, but it's probably requires one of those, "if it hurts, don't it again" sort of fixes. despite the numerous user interface ugliness, leopard is still tolerable, at least until apple comes out with an update to revert back to the tiger UI.

my grandmother called me out of the blue this afternoon. she was going through her cellphone contacts and found my number and decided to give me a call. she asked if i'd turned up my heat, and whether i was eating well. she knew about my roommate and asked when he'd be moving out. she asked if i was currently working. i told her about my cousin eric who's wife recently give birth to a baby boy (my grandmother already knew).