Looking for Harold and Kumar

I drove down to Jersey for a wedding last weekend. I was only there one day and the drive was about what I expected. I took a slightly longer route because I've always had traffic problems driving via NYC but I'm convinced I made it there in less time that it would have. Anyhow, it wasn't until after I arrived there that it occurred to me:

Hey! White Castle's is in New Jersey!

I looked them up when I first moved out to New England and was a bit disappointed that the nearest one was in New Jersey. I had since forgotten about it. Then I remembered after I got there. Durnit, I should have looked them up prior to my drive. Luckily I had MissyShow on the phone and she overcame her fears, phobias, and anxieties enough to go to her computer and look up directions for me. She rocked and found one less than 10 miles away. Oh my, it was 8pm and BSG came on at night. I high tailed it over and made it back in time to catch my show. (I know, nerd!)

So at long last. After 20 years I finally make it back to a bona fide White Castle restaurant to enjoy some freshly cooked sliders. Mmmmmm....

Shame the onion rings sucked. Didn't run into any pot sellers nor Neil Patrick Harris either.

Yes, I have an iPod too

So after all that text, weighing, deciding, and most significantly... waiting... I picked up a Nano later last year. I hesitate to critique something too much until I've had some experience with it. Some exceptions exist when I'm utterly convinced right away. The Nano was something I was a bit weary of from the get-go though. But now that I've had mine for nearly half a year I think I have a pretty good handle on my likes and dislikes concerning it.

The good

• It's tiny. Fits in every pocket. Feels sturdy dispite the size.
• Adequate space. Space for a thousand songs is good enough for my purposes.
  
• Bookmarks. I can leave a podcast/audiobook, listen to some music, then go back to it where I left off.
• Great interface. I almost can't imagine a better scroller/selector than the little touch-click-wheel and screen.
• Cool design. It's a pretty slick package ruined only by its exteme popularity.
• No moving parts, which is probably why I can get a good half-day's batter life out of it.
  

The bad but there are hacks and workarounds

• Can't manage/delete items using the device interface.
• Restrictions restrictions restrictions.
  
• Stuck with iTunes (though that's changing).
• Not usable as a general drive by default. I mean it's basically a flash drive with an extra processor and screen. Why not be able to use it as a USB drive out of the box?
• Stupid DRM.
• Only mp3 and aac support.
  

The annoying

• Didn't come with an outlet charger, just the usb-computer cord.
  
• Costs too much.
• Scratches easy.
• Add-on-itis items that are pricey too.
• Everything starting with lower-case-i.
• Non-changable battery.
• The PIM functions only work with Outlook, bah!
  

Wish it had, even at the expense of some space, but can live without

• Good recording capabilities.
• Digital output port.
• Radio tuner and ability to record off radio.
  

Still, it serves the basic needs and is an otherwise great little item that I'm fairly pleased with. Now to wait for the 32Gig version.

Of Moleskines and Men...

It was a bit over a year ago that I first read reference to the Moleskine notebook online. I was going through a fit of productivity porn, doing some online research trying to refine an organizing system to replace the defunct PDA that had broken on me the previous year (that's another topic). I had basically decided that I wasn't going to replace it and was using a paper/notebook system. At the time I was using a government issue memoranda book shamelessly pilfered from a filing cabinet most likely twenty odd years ago (I'm a recovering pack-rat). Quite simply, I was using it because it was there and at the time I was quite pleased to have a use for it after all those years.

Pretty much all my life I'd used various flavors of pocket notebooks. Mostly they were just any old notebook; some pocket sketchbooks, some of those sillly spiral ones from the grocery store, the $2 weaved ones from Chinatown, or whatever happened to be in the office supply cabinet. Occasionally I'd get a fashionable one that looked pretty. One thing I noticed about all of them, however, was that they never got filled. At some point I'd loose interest, or I'd start a new one, or I just wouldn't keep it with me and I'd forget about it. Basically there was nothing about them that really grabbed me or satisfied me.

Enter the Moleskine which quite immediately hooked me. (Ok that's not quite true, the first Moleskine I bought was the accordian file one, which I was disappointed in because it didn't hold enough index cards elegantly.) At first glance it doesn't look like much but I soon marveled at some things about it that I either never noticed or never cared about:

• The paper is nice. I was impressed how viscerally pleasant writing was even with a cheap ballpoint pen.
  
• The binding allows it to open completely flat. Book bound notebooks, even the sewn ones, don't open completely flat. Spiral bound ones have the annoying gap, and the springs tend to bend in my pocket.
  
• The elastic band is just a really nice add-on to keep it shut and compact. It has a silk bookmark too.
  
• The envelope in the back cover is very convenient.
• It's just the right size. Fits in my back pocket, and I can stuff post-its and index cards in there.
• I really do like the simple non-pretentious black design, with the pages flush against the edges. The rounded corners are smart too, makes it easier to slip into my pocket. The "moleskine" oil-cloth cover has a nice feel to it.
  

At last! Something I think they got right. And I will confess, I was completely taken in by the incredible marketing hype with references to artists and writers of old. But more than the actual hype was the community of new amateurs, artists, and hobbyists who used these books for incredible things and posted them up on the web. It all rekindled the old creative artistic side of me that had long been buried, suppressed, and zapped by grad school. Yes, I was completely taken in. I admit it.

Even though a low quality substitute could in theory do the same job, I immediately realized that it was worth it to me to spring a bit more for these and continue to do so. Reason: With any task tools do matter; good tools facilitate or encourage a task or behaviour more than bad ones. What's more is that unlike the cheapy random notebooks of old... these things will be more than just a organizational and journaling tool; I consider them keepsakes. And because of that, I am more inclined to be faithful and diligent in my use for them. I do very much lament that these notebooks had not been available to me long ago.