One thing that distracted me for a while was getting myself a new laptop, a 17″ MacBook Pro. Simply fantastic, of course. Huge and very bright sharp screen — I got a matte one — and fast. Oh, very fast. On my previous 1.5 Ghz 15″ PowerMac (a thing of beauty too), it took 28 seconds to typeset the Gödel book. Now the same LaTeX processing takes just over four seconds. And no, of course it isn’t that I really need all those saved twenty seconds in a day! But I don’t have to think any more about the business of refreshing the preview of the printed page — you just stop noticing the mechanics, so to speak, of using LaTeX.
I did think long and hard about whether to go for broke and get the big screen version. I’m glad I did. The laptop fits in the same bag I had before, and is not significantly heavier, so I don’t notice any real difference in the bother of carting it around. And after all, neither size MacBook Pro is the sort of thing you’d want to tote if you were really doing a lot of travelling (mmmm, the rumours of a really small laptop for 2008 are promising). So get the bigger one if you can: having the extra real estate again helps to make e.g. working with LaTeX (with TeXShop and BibDesk windows open, etc.) quite a lot more pleasant.
I’ve now just got to write another book to justify the expense …