BTW…I presume that Marcia used a model’s photo for her blog as that gorgeous woman can’t possible be the mother of teenagers.

With cashmere, shorter fibers are typically cheaper. With other fibers, such as wool, the length of the fiber depends on the variety of sheep, where on the body the wool is shorn from, etc… So, pilling is not necessarily indicative of an inexpensive garment.

Also, my G4 TiBook reception was crappy compared to my wife’s iBook. The plastic is just more transparent.

Along the lines of what Jay said, check out your AirPort setup utility. You have 3 options: 802.11b only, 802.11g only, and both. If you have extreme cards in all your notebooks, go for the 802.11g only option…that helped us out a bit.

And the main problem is probably all the other radio traffic in your neighborhood. My AirPort reception was wonderful in New Orleans in November, when I was one of 4 people on my block. Now, with the damned students ™ around, it’s less than wonderful.

(and besides – these days Keith Olbermann seems to have the market for self righteous and petulant snark well & truly cornered, nowadays)

On your WiFi, the short answer is, yeah, at its heart it’s a radio and radio transceivers can become less reliable over time. I had a wireless router gradually lose effectiveness, making the ‘puters in our house drop signals a lot more often. The router maker, to its credit, just gave me a new one and the rep said, to Gumpian effect, “these things happen.”

I also had problems once with compatibility of an Apple AirPort Extreme card (designed for 802.11g standard) running on an older WiFi network (designed for 802.11b standard). Your symptoms sound similar, so that’s something to check out at your nearest Apple Genius Bar.

One thing to try, on your router and then on your laptops (if they don’t auto-detect this): change the WiFi channel. Most routers default to channel 6 (I think) but you have several to choose from. If phones or neighbors’ WiFi or reflections from carrier pigeons’ leg-bands are causing interference, this may help.

Take the ‘book in for service and get it cleaned.

And Jennifer, that makes sense about the yarn fibers. No more discount cashmere for me.

I’m using a pretty old 12″ powerbook and I also have some occasional difficulties with wireless signals. It feels like it’s just getting old and tired like all the rest of us but a certain tech guy we both know says it’s due to DNS conflicts and other little problems. In general, the darn thing is old, heavily used, full of all kinds of junk, and has a whole bunch of user accounts and network locations.

I haven’t had any crashes *that* scary yet and I’m hoping it holds out until the tuition payments are a little closer to done and/or I become gainfully employed again.