How does my new Macbook Pro fit into my pen-and-paper world? (and other ruminations on 2010's digital-to-analog changes)

The title of this post is telling. As the year started, I was asking how pen and paper would fit into my digital life. Now, it's the other way around!

I bought a new Macbook Pro three days ago because the motherboard in my old Macbook died. A year ago, I would have been fidgeting with excitement all the way to Fry's Electronics. But yesterday, I think I would have been far more excited about buying a new high-end pen.

So, what are some of the other signs over the last year that pen and paper are gaining more influence in my life at the expense of digital devices?  Here's a partial list:

Calendar

Then: iCal, synced to iPhone.

Now: Junior size Circa, in a Circa Master Zip Folio, using templates downloaded from DIY Planner. The office uses Amicus Attorney practice management software, so I just check my paper calendar against the office's electronic master calendar. For a helpful view of upcoming events, Amicus can't hold a candle to a monthly layout in my planner.

Task Management

Then: Pretty much driven off my calendar. Then, I tried implementing Getting Things Done (GTD). First, in Things. A trial run on Omnifocus. Then, when I had to use a PC at work and my Mac at home, I tried assorted web apps so I could keep things synchronized. I tried around a dozen different online task management tools, each for anywhere from a few minutes to a few weeks to a few months. The ones that didn't have too many bells and whistles did not have enough, and few satisfied me that their security was stringent enough for legal work.

Now: Junior size Circa notebook, with an on-again, off-again GTD-Booker hybrid system, without the overwhelming options presented by most online or installed applications. Definitely a work in progress, but easier to maintain than the digital applications and less prone to induce endless tinkering with the system. (I must confess that I keep toying with Remember the Milk. Like the theory that a monkey at a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will someday peck out the Great American Novel by accident, I keep thinking I'll stumble across the perfect task management setup in RTM. But the fact that I'm just playing around with it rather than trying to actually use it takes away a lot of the pressure.)

Contacts

Then: Address Book on Mac and iPhone.

Now: Address Book on Mac and iPhone. I'm not about to copy hundreds of contacts into a paper notebook when they're already in my phone. Score one for digital.

Correspondence

Most of my email is business. In fact, I almost never initiate personal emails, unless its for something akin to something I would make a phone call for, but want to be less intrusive.

To keep family up to speed, I've been writing letters. Mom loves the letters, but she still likes me to call on the phone. Moms are moms.

Magazines

Then: I devoured MacWorld and MacLife every month, going through each of them cover-to-cover, highlighting all those applications that were going to make my life better (worse yet, seduced by all the free utilities, actually downloading them, and even forking out dough for others), lusting after the latest release of a new line of computers.

Now: I don't read MacWorld or MacLife at all. Somewhere during the last year, I let both subscriptions lapse. I do not miss them. At all. I never would have believed it. I haven't subscribed to any pen magazines, though.

Blogging

Then: Political blogs. Lots of 'em. Even had one myself. I could spend hours on those things. Sad, isn't it?

Now: Pen, paper, and stationery blogs. Lots of 'em. Even have one myself. I could spend hours on those things. Cool, isn't it?

Sleep (yes, sleep)

Then: hours every day on the computer, juggling emails, etc. left me fried, especially with several more "leisure" hours on the computer at home. Made me jumpy. Stayed up late.

Now: I was just kidding about all the hours on pen and paper blogs. I actually spend much less time on the computer when I am at home (and even less at work these days, too). That, and the fact that I find my letter-writing therapeutic, are two big reasons why I seem to sleep a lot better these days. I get to bed at least an hour or so earlier than I used to, on average. Then again, maybe I'm just getting old. Turned 50 this year.

Conclusion

Am I anti-digital? No. How anti-digital can you be if you have a blog? And I still have an iPhone capable of all sorts of things (but I mostly use it as a phone). Also, my dad gave me an Amazon Kindle for my birthday, and I use it all the time. I'm doing much more pleasure reading than I used to, with the e-books being so accessible and inexpensive. (All that reading is probably helping my sleep, too.)

I suppose it's always possible that I could still stumble across that magic software application someday, the one that will make everything come together. But that's unlikely . . . if it's out there, it will be hard to run across it, and if I do, I may not recognize it . . . because I'm not even looking for it any more.

How does my new Macbook Pro fit into my pen-and-paper world? (and other ruminations on 2010's digital-to-analog changes)

Winner of the world's most overpriced memo pad is . . .

Stationery Traffic.

To whom, unfortunately, I have no way of sending the notebook. I think I have matched an email to Stationery Traffic, but I have not heard back and there is no email link on that blog. So, ST, I'll give you until midnight Google Standard Time (the time stamp on your email) on Wednesday night (Dec. 22) to email me at notebookeresqATgmail.com. If I haven't heard from you by then, the notebook goes to one of the other nine bloggers!

Winner of the world's most overpriced memo pad is . . .

How I screwed up my first ink review — oh yeah, with a review of Private Reserve's "Burgundy Mist" ink thrown in!

This is my first ink review, so you'll have to cut me some slack. Perhaps you'll be more inclined to do so if you understand that tortured journey that brought me to this first review. If you don't care to read this part, skip to the heading "The Review" below.

The Struggle

About four months ago, I bemoaned the unhelpfulness of many ink reviews, due not to the inadequacies of the reviewers, but because of all the variables involved in performance. Really, all a review can do it tell you how the ink wrote in the particular pen(s), on the particular paper(s), with the particular nib(s) used in the review. On top of that, everything from writing pressure to humidity will cause variations even with a particular pen/paper/nib combination, and then you've got to wonder how closely the depiction on your monitor resembles the color of the ink when its right in front of you.

So, I set out to write the world's best ink review, even though I only started using fountain pens consistently last February. Such is my hubris, I suppose. I had grand plans of comparing entire color families in a single review, with the objective of helping readers choose the perfect gray, or perfect red, or perfect what not for their tastes.

I failed utterly.

Through the convenience of ink samples available through Pear Tree Pens and Goulet Pen Co., I started by comparing 6 different grays before settling on and purchasing a full bottle of my favorite. But I never got around to writing the review because all the sheets of writing I had in front of me at that time made the project too daunting.

So humbled, I set about trying to review one ink at a time, figuring I could at least design the perfect review format, with a consistent form that would provide readers with everything they needed to know about the ink. (There's that hubris again.) I'm sure there must be a name in the psychological literature for the symptoms I displayed in that difficult quest — but I believe the layman's term is that I "couldn't see the forest for the trees." I got so bogged down in minutiae (it is an exaggeration, but not a great one, to say that I was considering buying an anemometer, barometer and hygrometer so I could take wind speed, air pressure, and humidity into account) that I finally gave up.

Humbled yet again, I've decided to wing it with one or two good ideas that survive from my experience, and to refine my technique as I go. Why deprive my readers of my unenlightened ink commentary?  I mean, they come here for my unenlightened commentary on everything else, so why should inks be excluded?
  
As a result of all that, Private Reserve Burgundy Mist became the subject of my first review merely because I got tired of trying to do it right with some other colors, got fed up, and posted this out of exasperation.

But enough about my personal problems. On with the show!

The Review

I like this ink. A lot.

I should write a little more.

Like I said, I came up with at least one ink review idea that I think is pretty good. That is to show how
the ink looks from different nibs. So, I went online and ordered extra nibs for my Lamy Safari and Al-Star. Then I thought I'd also feature the ink in a "guest pen," i.e., something other than the Safari or AL-Star.

In the photo below, you can see the same line of text written in progressively broader nibs on the Safari, starting with XF on the top, on Rhodia Dot Pad paper:

Top to bottom: Lamy Safari with XF, F, M, B, 1.1 mm italic, 1.5 mm italic, and 1.9mm italic nibs; Cross Apogee F nib at bottom

 Here's a close-up to try to give you a better idea of the shading and color differences:

Shading is most visible in the italic nibs

Not much more help, is it?

I tried photographing the writing samples in flat outdoor light (both in and out of the shade on a cloudy day), next to a brightly lit window, even under a few different types of artificial light. None of the photos satisfactorily shows the differences in color and shading among the different nibs, but I ultimately used the photos taken next to a sunny window and applied the "enhance" function in iPhoto, which took me closest to the actual color of the ink. The best depiction of the shading is probably the enlargement at the beginning of this post.

Here, I've written next to some Burgundy Mist test squiggles in Visconti Burgundy with a Lamy Safari medium nib, and you can see that Private Reserve and Visconti have very different ideas of what "burgundy" is:

Visconti Burgundy looks red compared to PR Burgundy Mist

I wonder if they would see eye-to-eye on burgundy wines.

I didn't do extensive testing on flow, feathering, bleeding, etc. For one thing, these samples were written on a Rhodia Dot Pad, an insanely fountain pen-friendly medium, on which I don't expect any ink to bleed or feather. However, on less friendly papers the bleeding and feathering seemed modest, considering that my squared Moleskine bleeds inks so badly that I half expect it to cause a graphite pencil line to bleed through the paper.

I don't blame this skipping on the ink

Oddly, I did note that I got a lot of skipping on downstrokes when I did my handwriting drill with this ink in a Clairefontaine notebook.
That, too, is a canvas especially friendly to fountain pens, but this is not the first ink I've had skip a lot in it. That, combined with the fact that the nib seemed a little loose, makes me think that the ink is not to blame here.
So, there you have it. These photo enlargements don't look too good. I'm going to see if I can get better resolution photos up, so if you liked the review but didn't like the photos, try checking back in a week or so.

How I screwed up my first ink review — oh yeah, with a review of Private Reserve's "Burgundy Mist" ink thrown in!

The motivations of digital-to-paper converts (updated)

When I started this blog around five months ago, I planned to write more about . . . planning. Specifically, planning with paper. Even on an anonymous blog, however, I find myself reluctant to get very personal about it, because that means covering the failures as well as the successes. Besides, I found my interests unexpectedly hijacked by fountain pens and inks.

Today, I ran across a blog post that's making me think about writing more on planning and organizing. As I read it, I said "Yes! Yes!" over and over, because the point of the post is so in sync with the tagline of my blog — "A technophile attorney rediscovers the joys of pen and paper — especially notebooks!"

The post I'm talking about is Why techies are leading the back-to-paper movement, a guest post at Communication Nation by Douglas Johnston of D*I*Y Planner. As the title implies, it makes the point that those who advocate and practice paper planning are not limited to a few stray luddite holdouts resisting technology they don't want to learn, like those lawyers who refused even to have a computer on their desks when I started practice nearly 20 years ago. There is an entire movement of people returning to paper from digital, driven in part by how Johnston describes "the trouble with technology":

While I would carefully set up my list of 50-odd next actions, prioritising them, categorising them, setting alarms, and syncing between all the technology tools I had at my fingertips, Bettina would just glance at her book and get things done. This is not to say I was a slacker -- on the contrary, I did manage to plough through an extraordinary amount of work and training-- but a certain needless percentage of my time was spent tweaking my productivity system and trying to make it all work smoothly as a whole, mostly after-hours.

That said, I'm here to tell you first hand that converting to paper doesn't automatically cure the problem Johnston cites. It's possible to tinker with paper planning as much as with digital, with the same adverse effects. Paper advocacy online is a huge irony generally, but a more specific one in my case is that the tinkering I hoped to avoid by converting to paper has followed me to my new medium. I could spend days exploring around the D*I*Y Planner Forums looking for all the components of my perfect paper solution. (Grabbing that link just now, I was tempted to linger there!)

I'd like to expand on the point, and give my take on some other points raised in Johnston's post, but I'll leave that for future posts. Right now (again, somewhat ironically), I'm headed to an L.A. stationery store to check out some notebooks!

Thanks to Paper Notes in a Digital World for leading me to Communication Nation, and to The Pen Addict, whose weekly Ink Links post led me to Paper Notes. Hey, digital isn't all bad!

Update (7/25/10): Well, this is a little embarrassing, but that Communication Nation post is 5 years old! I assumed it was newer because Paper Notes said, in a post dated five days ago, that the article was about a month old. But the Paper Notes post was a apparently a repost from the archives.

Interesting, though, that there was nothing in the content to make it obvious that the post was five years old.  This tug-of-war between digital and paper doesn't really change.

The motivations of digital-to-paper converts (updated)

Monsters! Monsters, I say!

What possible motive could someone have for hacking the Fountain Pen Network? What malice! Fortunately, it looks like FPN is back up and running.

Monsters! Monsters, I say!

Just like the Carnival in Rio, only better!

Ok, it's nothing at all like the carnival in Rio. And I don't know if it's better, because I've never been to Rio. But it's pretty darn cool all on its own. And, while Rio is probably a once-in a lifetime trip for a lot of folks, you can go back to this carnival every month at a new place and always find something different.

It's the 11th Carnival of Pen, Pencil and Paper, hosted this month by Tiger Pens Blog.

Just like the Carnival in Rio, only better!

"Paper is the Killer App"

That's how the The Productive Luddite, a new site (still in beta), summarizes its productivity philosophy. If the name and summary aren't hints enough that the site is dedicated to productivity with paper rather than digital technology, there's the name of The Productive Luddite's blog: Paper Makes Me Happy.

Still in beta, the site's product catalog appears nearly empty, but its organization and the first few blog entries show a lot of promise. I know I'll be checking back.

One last thing: I would not have found TPL if I had not been checking out the referral sources in my Sitemeter stats. An unhealthy obsession with my traffic pays off more than occasionally with the discovery of new sites because they have linked to me.

"Paper is the Killer App"

The trouble with ink reviews

As you might guess from my last post, I'd love to have the problem of the blogger at Force de Frappe, who wrote earlier this month: "Diamine inks sent me 86 bottles of ink to review!

He then expressed the same concerns I have with ink reviews: they are unfair because of variables from one review to the other. I want to eliminate as many of those variables as possible. So, in my testing so far, I've been using the same two pen/nib combinations and the same two notebooks.

I've also been limiting myself to one color family (grays, for the time being). haven't gotten around to actually posting a review because I want to get through all the grays before posting a review about any of them. That's the only way I'll be able to write comments about each relative to the others. For example, which is the wettest-writing gray?

Where I'm the reviewer, another variable creeps in . . . my experience — or lack thereof. I've been writing with fountain pens for just a few months, and my knowledge and opinions have changed dramatically in that time. So, by writing up a single color family at the same time, I'll make sure the comparisons are based on the same mind-set and any differences noted among the inks is not due to more knowledge or different preferences than I had during earlier reviews. In fact, I may write up more than one ink per review. I don't know yet.

None of this is to say that I don't appreciate the reviews written by others. But the bottom line is that there's no way to tell if your experience with an ink will be the same as the reviewer's. I really liked the way Brian Goulet of Goulet Pen Co. put it in his review of J. Herbin Bleu Pervenche:

I've seen other ink reviews, and I wanted to put my own little spin on it. I started out with the idea of doing a comparison with dry times, saturation, flow, bleedthrough, blah blah blah. Bottom line is that ink is subjective, based on the pen you use, the paper you write on, and your personal writing style. Not to mention the fact that the lighting, picture editing, and your individual computer monitor settings will affect the color you see. So I took some nice pictures and will let them speak for themselves.

It's hard to imagine making an ink review really fun to read, but I'll do my best. 

The trouble with ink reviews

Pens and papers and lawyers, oh my!

Fellow lawyer Gary asked in a comment: "As one Esq to another I'd like to hear more about pen, paper and ink in your practice (as I sit at my desk wearing an ink 'incident')."

Thanks for reminding me, Gary, about one of the reasons I started this blog. I have occasionally tied the subject of a post to my law practice, but I'm sure I've missed some opportunities to do so. I will try to be more conscious of the issue while I draft future posts.

I looked over my posts so far, and there are some posts that reference law practice (albeit sometimes tangentially), including the culture of law (or at least, what I thought it to be), the technology-drenched modern practice of law, the practicalities of fine-point pens for litigation attorneys, how infatuation with gadgets can impede your thought process, a description of my initial set-up for using multiple notebooks for personal and practice task management (a plan that was out the window less than a month later), and the inadequacy of most annual planners for litigation practice.

I'm working on a review of the Levenger Annotation Ruled Yellow Notepads, which is definitely a post related to law practice, as Jay Foonberg says you should advertise yourself as a lawyer by visibly carrying a yellow legal pad everywhere you go!

"Ink incidents" at the office are a small concern for me, but so far I've been lucky. Fortunately, our firm's break room is equipped with a sink, so it's easy for me to rinse out my pens and change inks without much risk of making a mess. But there are plenty of other ways for ink incidents to occur, so I guss I'm bound to have one sooner or later. It's something akin to riding a motorcycle. When I bough t my first one, a friend who was an experienced rider pointedly told me: "There are two kinds of motorcycles: (1) those that have been "laid down" (any crash, however minor, that puts the bike on it's side), and (2) those that will be. I guess the same is true of pens and "ink incidents."

Pens and papers and lawyers, oh my!

10th Carnival of Pen, Pencil and Paper

. . . is now up at Whatever.

Use this link to submit your entries for the 11th Carnival (don't forget, like I did this month, and don't be shy about submitting your own), which will be hosted by Tiger Pens Blog on June 8.

10th Carnival of Pen, Pencil and Paper

Yes, Virginia, there is a Karen at Exaclair

Before starting this blog, of course, I read quite a few other pen/paper/notebook blogs, and I kept noticing all these references to "Karen at Exaclair," as in:
"Soo… recently I received quite a few goodies from Karen at Exaclair".

"Then came the opportunity to request another ink from Karen at Exaclair."

"It arrived today . . .  kindly sent to me by Karen at Exaclair."

"I need to apologize to Karen at Exaclair for not reviewing these items sooner."

"I'm still sick, and it's cold outside, so this seems like a good time to catch up on my review of the US version of the Quo Vadis Habana. Like the Rhodia Webnotebook reviewed last week, this was also a sample from Karen at Exaclair."

It was almost as if "at Exaclair" was her last name. But from my perspective, her last name did not matter. She seemed some sort of fairy showering gifts on experienced, popular bloggers while they slept. But for all these bloggers attesting to her existence, she sounded like a myth. Someone nice to believe in, but from whom you'll never actually receive anything.

Of course, I knew she was real. But it didn't feel right for me to ask her directly to send me something. What right had I, an upstart, know-nothing pen/paper/notebook blogger, to ask Karen at Exaclair -- that Karen at Exaclair, the Karen at Exaclair -- for anything? So, I went the indirect route by closing my my introductory post thus:

One thing is for sure: I am not writing this blog in the hopes that Karen at Exaclair, who seems to send free notebooks to bloggers far and wide so they can be reviewed on blogs, will send me any. Honest. I mean, after all, I'm a newbie. What would I know?

If she wants to send me the newest from Clairefontaine or Rhodia, I'm not going to resist, mind you.

Then, less than a month after I launched this blog, I got an email from . . . you guessed it . . . Karen at Exaclair, who had apparently found my blog through a comment I left at Rhodia Drive. She asked if I would like to sample a few products. Once I picked myself up off the floor, we exchanged a couple of emails, and a few weeks later (the delay being entirely my fault), there it was:

I swear that when I saw that package at my door, my heart and breathing stopped for a moment. (OK, maybe that's a little over the top, along with the "fairy" analogy, but I'm trying to be entertaining here, folks.) When I tore the package open I found a Rhodia A5 Webnotebook and large Quo Vadis Habana notebook to play with, as promised:

I feel awful for not reviewing either of these yet, even though Karen made clear that a review was unnecessary. Her interest is solely in getting honest feedback, and from what I've read around the Web, the companies behind the products distributed in the U.S. by Exaclair are very responsive to that feedback.

With the Webnotebook 3.0 coming out soon, I figure I better get off my duff and review the second-generation version I have before the review is moot! So, that's my weekend project. Tune in soon!

Yes, Virginia, there is a Karen at Exaclair

Pardon my dust, and sorry about the missing comments

You might find an entirely different look to the blog (perhaps several different looks) this weekend, as my unfortunate Disqus  experience requires that I tinker with my Blogger template this weekend to un-do the Disqus customization in the template. I will either go to the default Blogger commenting system or perhaps install Echo. While I'm at it, I may toy around with the blog layout.

My Disqus comments have not been working for weeks. Customer support has tried to be helpful, and I don't expect immediate response from a free service, but . . . for some reason, they don't even seem to understand the nature of the problem.

I don't mean to slam Disqus; they seem to be working for a lot of folks. In fact, if my blog were better established, I'd be happy to give Disqus more time to fix the issue. But this blog is young and growing in both traffic and feed subscriptions, and that's no time for comments to be down for an extended period. I've received some nice e-mails as substitutes for comments since the comments have been down and my entire readership (all four of you!) should have access to those remarks, so I'm determined to fix the commenting this weekend.

Unfortunately, all of the comments previously left on the blog appear to be gone forever. Sorry. Please don't let that discourage you from commenting in the future!

Pardon my dust, and sorry about the missing comments

Comments are down

My commenting system is down. Looks like Disqus screwed it up in the process of fixing a minor problem — lack of a trackback link — and turning it into a big one: no commenting at all! I've asked them to get to work on it. Please bear with me (and them).

UPDATE (4/4/10): This problem looked worse than I thought. My whole Disqus account for this blog appears to be gone! So many people have been so kind to comment already, and those comments may be gone forever.  It is important I get commenting going again, since I am planning a giveaway soon!

Comments are down

"At least you've got a nice pen"

Sorry to flake on all the new readers this week. I have been absolutely swamped at work all month, and this week took the cake.  Trust me, folks, an all-nighter on Sunday night is no way to start your week! (And they're a heck of a lot harder at age 49 than in your college years, I can tell you.)

I've been able to spend maybe an hour a day with my family this week, so the blog took a hit. Anyway . . .

This is going to be another crazy weekend, starting with a drive to the airport to drop off my wife and 8-year old daughter for a visit with her grandparents, then back to the grind to work all weekend and probably one more all-nighter between now and Wednesday. On Friday, I'll get to join my wife and daughter and finally relax a little with them.

Amid all this tumult, I took a few minutes from my work to show my wife — who seems mildly amused by my new-found fetish — the notes I had taken today in Private Reserve Copper Burst, which I just got on Wednesday. A few minutes later, I was ranting and raving about some stupid court rule making my life more difficult. When I was done letting off steam, my wife smiled at me and said, "At least you've got a nice pen."

And a nice wife, don't you think?

So, here's the Copper Burst and the rest of this week's order from Jet Pens:




I'm dying to open the Iroshizuku, but I'm so pressed for time, and  want to savor it, so I'm saving it for later. Reviews of everything here (except the Lamy converter) lie ahead . . . as time allows.

"At least you've got a nice pen"

Hey, Booker, where are all the product reviews? (A review of my first product review)

Since many of you probably found this blog through the The Pen Addict's link to my review of three fine-point gel pens, you may have taken a look around and wondered where all the other product reviews are.

Short answer: they're in my head. I decided after the first review that I may have been a little harsher on the products than I would have been if I had given them a longer test run. So, that's what I've been doing over the last few weeks: trying out products. Every product I plan to review has been getting more prolonged use than the pens in my first review. I'll be able to write reviews based on more experience with the products.

For those of you curious to know whats coming, I'm planning reviews on two fountain pens, five fountain pen inks, two highlighters (that's right, highlighters — unusual, but I'm hardly the first), and seven — count 'em, seven — notebooks. That ought to take me through the end of June.

Along the way, I'll continue to wax philosophical on technology's good and bad and the joys of returning to pen and paper.

Come back soon!

Hey, Booker, where are all the product reviews? (A review of my first product review)