A wander away from wireless….

I don’t go anywhere without my pocket notebook. It’s always to hand. Whilst I often use texting to store note-to-self messages (more on that in a later post - there’s a cool way to organise texts) no gadget comes close to the handy pen and paper, which is always on, totally wireless and utterly foolproof (but doesn’t spellcheck). That said, you can’t easily back them up!

I’ve been tempted on and off by electronic pens (like Logitech’s io <-- no link here deliberately, because I don't want you to buy one). I'm not going to make that mistake ever again. I think you know the one. Believing that any tech gadget can replace natural writing and talking - I think I’ve exhausted all of them and myself in the process. Smart pens have promise, but they need special paper and…. enough said about that.

The fashionable notepad is the Moleskin. Naturally, I was interested whilst suffering marketing-induced delusions that I might somehow benefit from owning a Moleskin simply because Hemmingway used one, blah-de-blah. I nearly caved in, having recently taken a liking to Hemmingway’s stuff. He was author of the month at the local book meeting in Borders. In the end I read the books and couldn’t go through with the meeting. I would probably sound like an unlettered village idiot, even though years of being in all kinds of meetings have taught me that most people don’t know what they’re talking about once the “expert language” is peeled away. Richard Feyman’s autobiography discusses this point well. Most of us remain fooled by “experts” for two reasons. Firstly, we feel too shy to say “could you explain that again please in plain English”. Secondly, we are shockingly unaware of bad thinking and are therefore easily fooled by anything that sounds vaguely intelligent. These two issues alone are causing a mass psychosis as we grapple with global warming, trans-fatty somethings, super nova and other things that we don’t fully understand and might be “bad” for us. OK, super nova aren’t bad for us….yet! (Or are they?)

Web 2.0 is a recent example. There’s so much waffle now that I feel like I’m in a sociology class or some Tolkien dreamscape, no longer in a precise tech world with a heritage of fine thinkers: Lorem ipsum quod pertinacia ne vix blah blah, and all that other dummy text, it may as well be. Now I know why some pages on the web display that nonsense. It ain’t accidentally left behind placeholder filler fodder, it’s Web 2.0! Let’s add it to the “definition” - UGC: user-generated crap. Business 2.0 might do a feature!

Back to Moleskins. Nice looking notepads and a legacy of brilliant minds, but one BIG problem! Nowhere to put the damn pen! I mean, why hasn’t anyone spotted this glaring flaw and done something about it? No doubt there is a perfectly illogical “reason” that Moleskin aficionados will argue. They probably suffer the same disease as those who insist that we can surf regular websites on two inch screens. Of course, it alls boil down to the meaning of the word surf and website and we’ll be lost in a semantic hell hole forever -

“In my opinion, the reason WAP hasn’t taken off is…..”
“No! You’re wrong. It’s….”
“What? don’t be daft! Everyone uses it. Here’s some meaningless stat off the web about WAP hits last Sunday…”
“Ah yes, but what’s a hit?”
“Hold on. I think I jotted this down in my Moleskin. Nope. Sh*t, I didn’t have a pen that day!”

What’s the solution? Moleskin 2.0 perhaps? Well, until then, I’ve found a nice solution to the problem. It’s the Zebra Expandz - a telescopic pen, which in its closed form is just about the right size to run along the top of the notepad tucked under the elastic whatsit around the outside.

p.s. I don’t own a Moleskin. I bought a cheaper competitor with a faux ornate leather binding.