Christmas has passed, all the presents are bought and given. It’s now time to start planning and gear up for MacWorld 2010.

I’ve been thinking about how there will be thousands of laptops there, and how they all will look the same. So my first idea was to come up with something to differentiate my MacBook Pro from everyone else’s. I actually had an issue at an airport a while back where me and another traveler had MacBook Pros go thru the xray machine at the same time and when they came out there was a moment of confusion.

I did some research and found a dozen or so vendors offering various vinyl decals. I considered GelaSkins but in the end I found LapTatt.

I chose the baby Mario on Yoshi and he is trying to eat the Apple logo.

So now my MacBook Pro has a shiny new sticker on its lid.

The next thing I had to consider was addressing the heat concerns from using the MacBook Pro in my lap. While not searing hot, it can become uncomfortable at times. From reviews I heard last year from the MacWorld show I decided to give the ThermaPak HeatShift Laptop Cooler pad.

This pad has crystals in it, that when heated will turn into a conductive gel, insulating your legs as well as wicking away the heat.

Okay, while at MacWorld I’ll be attending many different training seminars, how can I keep my MacBook Pro powered for that whole time? Currently I am getting about 2 hours of charge on my internal battery that is a little over a year old. I have the first 15″ unibody model so there is an option to purchase a second battery, but I’m only going to get 5 hours out of both batteries, MacWorld seminars run 8-9 hours a day.

I did more research and came up with an external power solution called the HyperMac This device is an external battery, and they say the 100 watt hour should give me 13.3 hours of “normal” runtime on 1 charge. I will be testing this later this week but if that’s true, my entire MacWorld trip will be powered and I won’t have to think of rationing!

Lastly, as you may have heard me before – I have one computer and prefer to keep all my data with me. Recently I bought the OptiBay This is a device that allow you to mount a hard drive in the laptop’s optical bay, allowing for the use of a second Hard Disk.

Currently I am running a 7200 RPM 500GB HDD in the primary HDD bay and a 7200 RPM 300GB HDD in the optibay mount. The 300GB HDD is almost full with just my iTunes Library (yes, I know… I have a problem!)

So I decided to upgrade the optibay drive with a 5400 RPM 750 GB HDD from Other World Computing

After listening to various other podcasters talk about the speed increase from Solid State Drives I finally broke down and during the same order for the 750GB HDD I ordered a 250GB Solid State Drive.

So the plan is to place the OS on the solid state drive and map my user directory to the 750GB hard drive.

One last thing I am thinking of doing this weekend after all these toys gets here is to do some power and speed benchmarking. I’m interested to see how much power the second HDD takes up (so far I’ve been using the optibay with 2 spinning disks for about 2 weeks and I haven’t noticed any impact to my battery life.)

I would like to see how my internal battery fares with 1 SSD drive and 1 optical, 2 spinning disks and 1 SSD and 1 spinning disk. I’m also interested in the actual battery life of the HyperMac power unit. All of this will be benchmarked over the next few days and I will be doing a blog post or podcast on it.

I’ve been toying with the idea of using my old 17″MBP as a media center. Plugging in my eye tv and turbo h.264 into it and letting it record and stream tv shows (via the iPhone application) as well as host all my ripped DVD’s in iTunes. Also by using the home sharing feature. This way the wife and I could backup our itunes libraries to the same place. I might even set up iPhoto to share as well so we have a central place to backup the iPhoto libraries as well.

I’m planning on getting the mac mini server after the first of the year, and I’m wondering how much of this I’d end up moving over to the server.

As you can see I’m still in the musing and planning process… any thoughts or suggestions?

It’s been a long and busy week for me. But I was excited today to receive my copy ofMacSpeech Dictate. I plan on doing a full review for my podcast, but in the meantime I am playing around with it. In fact I’m using it to write this blog post. While not the most intuitive to use right off the bat. I can see how this will definitely increase the speed at which I will create text documents. Also I have reloaded my 13 inch MacBook I will be using that as a clean platform to use while creating my Mac 101 podcast series.

I am wondering if I should separate my Mac 101 series out from my normal podcast and resume doing intermediate to advanced subjects and creating another feed for the Mac 101 series. I realize my last podcast was a little simple for my average listener. I would appreciate some feedback on this to find out what you, the listener feels.

In fact any kind of feedback from you would be wonderful as to what subject you want to see in the podcast, or any questions you have that I may assist you with.

Today I took delivery of the new MacBookPro. I’ve been pining for one since their announcement. I have the first Gen MBP that can only max at 2gb of ram and lately I’ve been hitting that limit a lot, causing the laptop to crawl.

Unboxing photos can be found here.

First Impressions -

It’s smaller than my 17″, while expected it might take a little to get used to. It’s solid – this thing just feels solid, like it’s one piece, very rugged. Runs Cooler – since it’s just out of the box and running with the less powerful GPU that might have something to do with it, but really the bar onto of the keyboard isn’t even warm yet. (owners of previous MBP will understand this.) It’s bright, yes the OLED backlight makes a huge difference, the shiny glass screen tho, well I will have to get over it, the colors pop but now and then I can see the logo from my sweatshirt staring at me. Trackpad – I thought this was going to bug me, really it’s no different in the feel – button or not, I still use thumb to press button and finger to move about. I like the new finger gestures.

Setup was a snap, it tied me to my Mobile Me account quickly, and with the new 802.11n wifi (was on g) the updates took not too long to install. As for migration, I’ve decided to do it manually. I have a lot of apps and pref panes on my original MBP that I rarely use, so I will install apps on my new MBP on a as needed basis.