The Digital Consultant

Thanks to my main man Paul I had the opportunity to contribute to the local launch of iTunes U along with a few others. (see here for my paltry contributions) As a "reward" Apple loaned out a MacBook Pro to contributors for about a month and a bit (so generous!) I saw this as pretty ridiculous at the time and wasn't going to bother given we had already created the content (I am already toting a MacBook with Snow Leopard and 2GB of RAM) But I do regular full image backups (love my SuperDuper) so in the end thought what the heck, take it for a spin.
It didn't take long to get the beast set up and I was immediately glad I did. Quicker processor and twice the RAM made it super snappy and I had forgotten how much I liked the backlit keyboard of my old aluminium PowerBook. But it wasn't all spped and nostalgia. The SD/SDHC card reader was probably what I liked the most. I have a Panasonic HDC-SD5 which gets a lot of use. I'm addicted to browsing clips on the card for selective importing (I get stabbing head pains just thinking about tapes now) and the "built-in-ness" made it much quicker than my USB card reader.
I'm due for a new machine in a few months. It will definitely be a MacBook Pro (13 inch). I'm eyeing off one of those 128GB SSD's to slot in as well to see if they live up to the hype.
Rank has some priveleges.

We recently purchased some trackpad skins for the MacBooks we have at work. Being that pristine white colour they tend to show their "dirtiness" pretty quickly so protective skins on the trackpads sounded like a pretty good idea. Enter Skin Styler They're a company based in Malaysia from what I understand, so you upload an image and they email you a couple of different design options based on the colour scheme of your image. All the designs looked very smart and we settled on the the school logo in the centre of the trackpad with a dark blue button (to hide the smudges!) Looks pretty sweet I reckon.

Once installed the trackpads aren't quite as responsive as before but that can be adjusted in system settings and the general feel of them is satisfyingly tactile. The students have reported they feel a bit different but just take some getting used to. They definitely like the look.

Correspondence with SkinStyler was very good. I submitted a request through an online form an once I sorted out an overzealous spam filter received a very timely reply. We ordered around 70 units which was no trouble at all and the turnaround from confirmation of design to delivery was about a week. They even attached a pdf invoice to make passage through accounts easier. I would recommend them without hesitation to anyone with a few MacBooks that they would like to keep in good shape.