Indigo Kelleigh’s 8-bit Tarot Cards

I stumbled upon Indigo Kelleigh's fantastic Tarot cards some time ago. Based on the popular Rider-Waite deck that's in widespread use, Kelleigh's deck is faithfully illustrated using an 8-bit retro computer graphic style. If you grew up with computer games in the 80s and 90s, you know what I'm talking about. Before we had millions of colors and photographic imagery on the desktop, computer artists basically had to work with what amounted to a digital Lite-Brite, hand-picking each pixel and color to create cartoony imagery. It is not unlike creating a mosaic out of tiles, with a very limited color set. People of my generation, however, remember this era of computer gaming fondly because quality games had to rely on good game play and story--or so we game snobs like to believe.

Anyway, Kelleigh's 8-bit Tarot covers all 78 cards in the Rider-Waite, using the same 256 colors that used to be the standard system palette on the Macintosh. That may sound like a lot of colors, but when you consider that realistic shading can take dozens of colors for each hue, you quickly exhaust your color budget. Experienced computer graphic artists dither colors to create the illusion of intermediate shades of colors; this works well if the resolution of the screen is high enough with photographic imagery. The technique creates a stippled effect that makes connoisseurs of aged computer graphics nod with heartfelt appreciation.

But I've prattled on enough...just take my word that these are really cool. The complete set became available recently for sale, and I jumped to snag a couple for my collection of esoterica. Have a look!

They're not very large cards, slightly smaller than a standard playing card. However, the printing is quite good and is on a nice coated cardstock. The cards also come in a very cool brown box decorated with blocky 8-bit illustrations done in a Victorian (?) style. The mixing of retro 8-bit graphics with retro package design is very cool.

I suspect they will also work just fine as any Rider-Waite deck for Tarot purposes, as Kelleigh's digital creations are based on the thematic elements that are in Pamela Colman Smith's original illustrations. You can see the entire card set at Kelleigh's site. If you've got US$30 burning a hole in your pocket, head on over to the lunarbistro store and send the artist some bucks.

Inka Pen, 1.5 Years Later

Back in late 2007 I bought myself an Inka pen, and have been carrying it in my front pants pocket practically every day since.

Every once in a while, I catch myself noticing that the pen still looks good, so I took some macro pictures of it to document how well it has aged. It doesn't look that different from the time I noted my impressions when it was new.

While it's held up pretty well, the pen's shininess has dulled slightly with use. There are a few small scratches from scraping against keys and coins in my pocket, which isn't surprising since I keep it on my main key chain. So far, it has not malfunctioned or disappeared on me. There are even a few design details that had escaped me before; the machined metal tube has a small groove to catch the blue silicon o-ring that holds the pen in place. It's still holding the pen securely in its metal sheath after all this time. And more amazingly, the tube hasn't dented or bent in any way I can see. This is a quality product.

The place I see the most wear is on the end-cap, where you can see a few dings in the plastic. This might be from when I use my teeth to hold the end of the pen when I'm scrambling to juggle numerous items in my hands. But it's not objectionable. There is also some wear on the key chain ring holder, but I have not yet seen any cracking or other signs of imminent failure. And if it did, the Inka people have a lifetime mechanical warranty on their product.

How it is writing with the pen? Well, it's a little cramped if you don't take the time to completely assemble it, and the feel of the ink isn't going to beat a good rollerball or fountain pen. However, this is the pen that I always have, unless for some reason I don't have my usual keys with me. And that has proven to be very convenient. Most things that stay in my pockets get destroyed fairly quickly---you should see the sad state of my Moleskine notebooks---but the Inka keeps on rockin'.

Cachet Classic Graph Sketch Book

A few months ago I'd stumbled upon an old hard cover quad-ruled notebook that I'd misplaced way back in 2002. The notebook, with a sturdy pebbled exterior and smooth wire binding, impressed me anew, so I pressed it back into daily service. When I ran out of pages a few months later, I freaked out and spent half the day trying to remember where I'd originally gotten it. There were no manufacturer's markings anywhere on the notebook, so I visited every store in the area that carried art, office, and architectural supplies. Nothing I found there was a match, either not being available in quad-rule (i.e. graph paper) or lacking the hardbound covers w/ spiral binding.

It was only when I took a day trip into Harvard Square to specifically visit Bob Slate Stationers did I rediscover my dream notebook. It's the Cachet Classic Graph Sketch Book. I am going to have to stock up on them.

There are several features that I love about this notebook:

• It's bigger than the average notebook, but not that much bigger at 9x12 inches. This gives the notebook a slightly more serious presence, and has the added advantage of neatly swallowing loose 8.5x11 pages. Usually, when you stuff a piece of loose-leaf letter into another notebook, some bit of it sticks out and gets frayed. The notebook also looks kind of ratty with the edges of papers sticking out. Gross.

• It uses sturdy double-looped wire binding, which allows the notebook to either open flat on a table or fold-over neatly like a pad. This is incredibly useful. The wire binding is also large enough to snugly hold my Lamy Safari pen, which is very convenient. The wire binding is also unusually tidy...quality stuff. A lot of the other sketchbooks use wire binding that's easily warped out of shape due to under-engineered wimpiness, which leads to snagging when rapidly deploying onto a coffee shop table.

• It's a hardcover, and the cover stock they use is truly rigid. It's similar to the stuff you see used for library thesis bindings, very sturdy and confidence-inspiring. If you are using the notebook with both covers folded in back, you have a very stable writing platform that doesn't flex. The corners on my circa-2000 notebook have, with time, become worn, but the structural integrity of the notebook hasn't been compromised. It actually just looks cooler.

• The paper stock is smooth and highly bleed-resistant. I'm using fountain pens (Lamy Al-Star and Safaris loaded either with cartridge or Noodler's), and the wring action is smooth without being loose. Also, I haven't noticed any significant bleeding of my writing to the other side of the page, which is a relief. Even the printing of the quadrille pleases me. The line quality consistent in tone and thickness, just present enough without being overbearing. It's even in non-repro blue.

The only down side of this notebook is the price; I paid $25 for a single 80-page notebook in Harvard Square. The prices are probably inflated quite a bit, because I've seen prices online for the same notebook (now that I know what it is) for about $13 a pop. Still pretty pricey, but I've yet to come across another notebook that actually makes me happy. Not even my Moleskine reporter-style notebooks make me as happy, mostly because I don't really like the tooth of the paper and it doesn't take to fountain pens as well.

I was unable to find out much about the company that produces these sketch books, Cachet Products Incorporated of Fairfield, New Jersey. This is an astonishingly well-made sketch book that meets all my criteria for a daily process book, and I want to know how this has come to be.

UPDATE: I happened to spy a "Cachet by Daler-Rowney" Original Classic Sketchbook in my bedroom. Daler-Rowney is a UK company that is the result of a merger with George Rowney, Ltd and the Daler Board Company. Daler-Rowney also sells a 9x12 wirebound sketchbook. But who is the originator?

Little Birds

Every once in a while I like to check out a store online called See Jane Work. I have an irrational love of paper and office supplies, and I enjoy the cheerful upbeat nature of the site. Everything is so cute! If this website were a gal, I'd marry her :-)

Today I ordered my first product, a magnetic chirping bird for holding paper clips. This is probably the least necessary thing I need in my office, but its role is more symbolic than functional. There are these little birds that I see every day at Starbucks in the morning; I believe they are some kind of common swallow. I usually sit outside if it's not raining, taking in the morning air, and observe these birds almost every day. There's something about the way these birds approach us that I find fascinating. They're tiny, fluffy, and pretty cute. They're also diligent, bold, and industrious. I realized a couple weeks ago that they do a very good job of "just being themselves", and that I could learn a thing or two from them. I sometimes get wrapped up in thinking I should be "more professional" or "building my career", and though I've definitely chosen a more non-traditional path to life-work I still get caught up in thinking about "success" and how people perceive me. Those little birds have no such pretensions, and every day they remind me that my OWN little bird inside of me needs to come out and "just be". That realization has become one of my moral compass points.

That my moral compass point is now available in shiny magnetic bird form is just a bonus. Woot!

OLPC XO Laptop: First Impressions

I was pleasantly surprised to receive my XO Laptop, formally known as the $100 Laptop for the One Laptop Per Child non-profit, and I just spent a couple hours playing with it. It is the cutest, coolest piece of gear I have in the house. I would venture to say that it's WAY cooler than my MacBook Pro 17" which is, basically, a production workstation. Sure, the XO is not very fast, is made of the type of plastic that's used for toddler toys, and the "keyboard" is a chicklet-style membrane that is not designed for touch-typing. There isn't a hard drive, and it doesn't run Windows or a window system for that matter. So what good is it you ask? It's good for getting education and computing into the great outdoors, that's what. It is the most exciting thing I've seen in quite some time. Yes, I even think it's cooler than the iPhone.

Admittedly, it is designed for smaller hands than mine, and in terms of speed you can practically feel the tiny processor grunting to itself like a jogger huffing I CAN!!! toward the top of a mountain as tourists stare curiously at him from their air-conditioned rental cars. Fast, it isn't. It reminds me a lot of one of the microcomputers I wanted when I was 12, the Sinclair ZX80. Like the Sinclair, the XO makes thrifty use of its limited memory. And like microcomputers of the early 80s, the XO is open. Open Source, in fact. The guts of the software are accessible, so this is a machine that people just getting introduced to computers will be able to learn on. What's really exciting, though, is the quality of the I/O. There's a camera, microphone, speakers, a high-res sunlight-readable display, and self-organizing mesh networking all built in. For expansion, there are USB ports and a memory card slot. You can take this computer on outdoor adventures with you, take pictures and notes, and share your findings with your peers around you. I find this incredibly exciting.

I haven't really played with the software at all yet, but I'm looking forward to trying to use this machine quite a bit as my primary "on the go" laptop to see what it's like. When I'm traveling around I usually just take notes anyway in my reporter-style Moleskine. The wireless networking capabilities of the XO should make this a good coffeehouse companion, though the keyboard is not suitable for touch typing at all.

Fortunately for me, the XO recognized my treasured IBM Model M 84-Key Space Saver Keyboard, which I plugged through a PS2-to-USB adapter. Seemed to work fine with the machine. When you put the XO into tablet mode, you end up with a very compact word processing station that is high-resolution and usable in direct sunlight. While the XO is supposed to run for quite a while on batteries (especially with the backlight off), the additional current drain of the Model M keyboard might reduce battery life further...I have no idea.

Anyway, it's here in time for Christmas, so I'm looking forward to spending a bit of time looking at the development environment. It might be neat to develop some portable tracking tools for the machine, if only for my own amusement.

Inka Pen

I've been writing way too much heavy stuff about focus lately, so it's time for a quick gear break!

I ordered an Inka Pen from ThinkGeek a few weeks ago, hoping to use it as a replacement for the flat pens I've been using. While I like the flat pens, they are not quite as durable in the pocket, and despite their relative thinness they tend to bulge out of my reporter-style Moleskine notebooks. Wear and tear is also increased because I carry the notebook in my back pocket, which makes the flat pen tend to chew its way out of the pocket. Not good.

Construction

The Inka pens are pretty cool, having been designed for extreme conditions by its inventor, Greg Adelman. From the website:

Lightweight, watertight and built to withstand harsh environments. The pressurized ink cartridge ensures the pen will write wet or dry at any angle, any temperature, and any altitude.

I was a little skeptical about the robustness of the pen, because I could imagine the steel barrel warping or other some similar disaster occurring. This post on Kickstart News, however, offers some heartening detail about the pen's machined outer barrel and carbon-fiber inner body construction.

I've been carrying the Inka around on my keychain for about a week, and I haven't yet noticed any warping or even scratching. We shall see how it holds up over the long term, but two small details give me hope: the end of the steel outer body, which you can see above, is utterly round and smoothly polished, unlike just about every mass-market pen I've ever seen. The pen also screws together without any scratchiness or scraping sensation, again unlike just about any other pen I've owned. This is a precision-made object.

The pen itself is comprised of several unscrewable components. You can use the pen in two ways:

• Pull the pen straight out of the outer body tube. It's held in place with friction from a blue o-ring. The pen is short, but usable.
• Assemble a full-size pen. Unscrew the pen from the key ring cap, then screw the mini pen to the end of the outer barrel. The result is a full-sized pen that feels pretty good in the hand.

The one down side I've found about the Inka pen is that it got me held up at the TSA security line. It didn't help that I was also carrying a stubby plastic pen shaped like a small cigarette and mechanical lead engineering pencil with a very cool double-clutch lead gripping mechanism on top of the usual laptop gear. My laptop bag must have looked like a bomb maker's tool kit. :-)

Gifts for Hardcore Productivity Nuts: Magnatag Visible Systems

We born-again productivistas are packin' paper heat in our leather-backed Moleskines and slingin' Hipsters in our back pockets like they grow on trees instead of bein' made from 'em. Back at the ranch we've got Noguchi and tickler files backing us up, keeping our thoughts sizzling and ready-to-go. I once seen a guy, a specialist by the looks of him, use simple index cards kill a task dead at 15 paces without having to click a single mouse button. Welcome to the Wild Wild West of Paper Productivity. It's a gritty, physical world we live in, and we likes our tools to be tangible, portable, and crushproof. Booyah!

As tough as I reckoned I was with all my paper-based weaponry---you should see the paper task shuriken I've been working on---my delusions of badassedness came to an abrupt end when I came across Magnatag products half a year ago. I had stumbled onto a trove of custom magnetic whiteboards and task tracking support tools, built large from steel and plastic. They're working tools for daily use in the field, for information-critical activities like truck dispatching, construction projects and even church management. From shipping containers to saving souls, Magnatag seems to have an informational whiteboard product for every industry that needs to get things done. Suddenly, my pretty inkjet-printed forms didn't seem so substantial, especially when the most pressing item listed is don't forget to buy more cat food and toilet paper.

That said, I try to learn from my mistakes, especially when it means there's an opportunity to upgrade my arsenal. If you are shopping for a productivity freak itching to lay the hurt on a pile of projects, you might give Magnatag a look-see. Here are some new products I've taken a fancy to since my last post:

[NOTE: I've just read in the comments that the Magnatag website is only viewable in North America. Apologies for the inconvenience.]

The Magnatag Grand Planner shows up to two years of a project, in familiar Gantt chart style. That's a big board, for big jobs.

For those seeking something a little more intimate, this Personal Time-Task Organizer might do the trick. I like the idea of it, though I don't have space to put one.

I love the idea of the Tack-Free Quick Change Bulletin Board, as one might guess from my dalliance with check rails and task tracking.

These TCards fit into a special board, and are loaded with information. I don't know what I'd personally do with it, but dang...I want one anyway.

I like the name of the Do-Done StepTracker, and I love the idea of "flip the magnetic button over to switch from to-do to done" functionality. Elegant and effective!

Ok, I listed this one before, but now there's a video showing just how the RotoGraph® Long Range Daily Line Item Planner actually works. It's one continuous scrolling surface that you can write your schedule on, kind of like a real-world version of Excel with locked sheet cells.

This is a great idea: a whiteboard with faint gray lines that show up only when you're up close. A whiteboard to put an end to migraine-inducing crooked writing!

There's all kinds of other stuff, like the crazy awesome specialty boards, including a transparent whiteboard for use with neon markers...great for that "war room" look, I'm thinking. Check the older Magnatag post for more interesting items.

The Story of Magnatag

As I oooohed and aaaahed over the products in the Magnatag online catalog, I couldn't help but wonder who or what was behind it all. Usually, I think of office supply provisioners as being rather lame, pumping out mediocre product with little effort going toward innovation. About six months ago, though, Magnatag's PR company came across my blog and asked if I had any questions about the company. I got to email some questions to the founder, Wally A. Krapf, who generously forwarded me several fascinating anecdotes about sales, personal initiative, and risk from his days as a young salesman-turned-entrepreneur in post-WWII Rochester, NY. Here's an excerpt about how he got the idea for Magnatag.

NOTE: I've removed names for purposes of privacy, edited some sentences out for flow, and bolded a few phrases for my own emphasis, but otherwise this is what Wally related to me via email:

Dave, you ask for a comparison story about our very first original product that I saw could be made as a new company. Actually it did not come about that way. Each day brought a new challenge, adventure and learning as I evolved and applied my “systems” marketing concept to my sales job. It all kind of evolved over time like I was being drawn toward a distant goal in mind that each day’s activity brought a little closer and clearer and sharper until the time just arrived to make the move to “go on my own”. On the personal front, I was married and had three young kids to support as a commission salesman, so income generation was a very big incentive, but not the really driving one.

The concept of making my own products, and marketing them by direct mail came about piece by piece after I had left the stationery company and set up my own business as Krapf Business Systems, Inc. on January 30, 1967. It is hard to isolate a significant event to say that it was the bright light that flashed on and became the company we have today. Each step evolved and was driven usually by reaction to some negative event with a lesson learned and applied.

[...] Anyway, after I conceived the idea of “systems packaging” of selling products as a solution to a problem by bundling all the components into a single entity, I discovered that many of my customers had the same problems and that one packaged solution could be sold to many others with similar problems, only tailoring it to each potential customer’s specific needs and pointing out clearly to him that he had a problem, which they often did not realize. (Listerine told you that you had Halitosis, Nexium told you that you had acid reflux disease, for example).

[...] Our stationery company [where Krapf worked before founding his own company--Dave] was housed in an old loft 4 story building near the headquarters of Kodak in downtown Rochester. It was the old Shinola Shoe Polish factory from the early days of Rochester when it was a center of the men’s fashion clothing industry with hundreds of companies housed in as many loft buildings in the old city, each contributing a piece of the fashion pie. In fact my dad earned his living as a freelance commercial artist doing many of the fashion paintings for industry advertising. When depression hit before I was born, most of his business folded and we lived through some pretty hard times through the 1930s and through the war.

The stationery company had a “systems division” that basically sold the Acme Visible Record line of information storage and retrieval systems equipment. I was getting bored with the furniture and supplies and wanted to get into this department. It really seemed challenging and fun. It was run by an old WWII vet named D- ( a D-Day Silver-Star Purple-Heart veteran, 13 years older than me. He is now 88 my good friend and we lunch every month with the other old vets I told you about). D- had just fired a salesman who had sold a large system to a bank and lost money on it. I pestered D- to give me his job, but he kept turning me down saying there was not enough business for the both of us. I kept after him for about a month and every day he kept painting a more dismal picture of my earning potential as his assistant. To get rid of me he made me a ridiculously meager offer of a sales draw that was about a quarter of what I was making in the furniture. To his shock, I took it. Everybody in the place thought I was nuts making a move like that. I started on a Friday morning. D- took me to what was supposed to be a sales call at Xerox, but he was actually just picking up an order he had sold earlier. Then he took me to an early lunch and when we returned to the office he told me he was taking 2 weeks vacation and that it was all mine. He walked out. As soon as he left, I backed my station wagon up to the door and loaded it up with all his customer files and catalogs and took them home. I studied them all weekend. The line was very complex. On Monday, when repeat customers called, I told them I was new and asked them to help me work through the product line with them. When D- returned I had it down cold. 2 months later he left the department and took my old position selling furniture. He kept dropping in to the systems office every day and we became really good friends. D- kept saying “You know, we really don’t need the stationery company to do this, we could keep all the profits ourselves if we went out on our own” At first I thought he was kidding, but after a few months it started to come about. In the meantime I had applied my “systems packaging concept” to several complex but very interesting applications (designing unique voter registration systems, jury selecting systems, and others, selling them to several counties in western NY state. (another interesting story).

One day the field rep for Acme Visible showed up unannounced and introduced me to the manufacturer’s vice president and told me that I had built up their business in Rochester to such an extent that they were putting in their own factory direct sales office and gave me 30 days to close up. Acme accounted for about 90 percent of my business. The owner told me I could come back to selling the furniture (about 2 years had elapsed). I told him forget it and to “just leave me alone, I’ll be just fine”. Although Acme had a very broad line and there was no other manufacturer who had one even near it, each product segment of their line had competitors. I immediately got on the phone and started calling up the competitor manufacturer sales managers and made appointments to visit their factories. I got in my car and started driving. At the end of about 2 weeks I had visited each plant, and secured a dealership on each competitive line. In the end the product mix I put together was much larger than the Acme line. Unfortunately,. I had made the mistake earlier of having Acme drop ship all my sales, so they knew exactly who all my customers were and gave that list to their new salesman, so I had to start from scratch again, except that I had created a lot of personal relationships with the customers most of who switched over to my new lines. ( I noticed that mostly the newer customers switched, which told me that the loyalty gradually moves from the salesman to the product once they become accustomed to it)

[...] I was [now] selling a broad line of business filing systems, visible record retrieval systems equipment, complex business forms and a lot of unique products including a new line of magnetic scheduling boards. The scheduling board people would send me sales leads from their space advertising, but I soon found them to be pretty poor quality and mostly a waste of time. Their catalog just showed photographs of existing boards in their customer’s offices, and a list of components you could select and build your own system. One day I was selling a filing system to a high school and saw they had a cork board on the wall with paper stickers on it showing teacher-class schedule against the daily periods. I suggested that we could do it better with color-coded magnets, and designed a system right on the spot which they ordered. I cold called a couple more high schools and made an easy sale at each. I then started calling on them all over the area and sold several. When the manufacturer asked me about them and I told them what I was doing, they offered me $500 if I would write up how I did it, for their sales manager. I ignored the request, but got to thinking, they should be the ones telling me how to sell their product not the other way around. In the mean time I also created a computer scheduling board system. In those days if you got a computer, you build a big glass walled room to house it, positioned it on a special built up floor with air conditioning to keep it cool, and invited all the neighbors to come in to see how modern you were. Of course, any department that wanted to use it had to reserve time on it, and I found that that called for a magnetic scheduling board with the 24 hour time scale reservation time spaces and color-coded application magnets. I also had designed system kits for school bus route scheduling and hospital staffing schedules. (another story).

One day I was selling a computer schedule to the Friden company factory when they asked me if I had a thin magnet that they could write on and erase to use to label their parts bins that were constantly changing contents. The magnets I was selling with the boards were about a third of an inch thick with stiff plastic plates adhered to them. You needed a saw or guillitine type blade to cut them. I asked the factory to make them thinner but they refused to consider it. The problem intrigued me, so I looked up the manufacturer of the raw magnet material (Goodrich) and got some samples of the extrusions (the only ones made in those days). I sliced them thin and then went to a local plastic supplier and went through hundreds of plastic samples until I found just the right one that would take writing, not smear and erase with a damp tissue. Next I had to find an adhesive that would cement the plastic to the thin magnet, be flexible because the magnet material bent easily, and wouldn’t come off after being bent or twisted. I also wanted a product that you could easily cut with a scissors. I was having no success with the adhesive, so I went to the adhesive wholesaler and asked for their help. They were not very interested but told me they had a loft with all the special adhesive tape samples the manufacturers were sending them over the years and I was welcome to poke around there and see if I could find what I needed. I spend 2 very hot sweaty summer days in that loft but finally found one that worked after hundreds of tests. That was 38 years ago. They put me in touch with the rather obscure adhesive manufacturer, I had them make me some and voila, I had my first invention, the Magnatag. The very first successful magnatag I made in my basement at home and when I came up and showed it to my wife, she said “When are you coming up for dinner?”

A year later the adhesive started to liquify and the plastics started to come off in the field. My next door neighbor was a chemist at Kodak so he took a sample to work, analyzed it and told me to tell the adhesive manufacturer to change one of the chemical components which they did. I still use that adhesive today.

At first I called them Magnamatic labels, until one Saturday morning I started rhyming mag with words to get a better name: Magnatag. I started showing them on my customer calls and they got a really good reception. By the way 6 months had gone by since the guy at Friden had asked for the special magnets, but by then he had left and the new guy was not interested. I also soon found that my new magnets were much better on the scheduling boards that the klunky ones that came with them, so I decided to drop the other supplier and make my own boards and magnets, (I didn’t tell them right away because I knew they would immediately send another salesman to compete with me, which the sales manager, E-, who left them a few months later told me on a visit to my office.) I bought green steel chalkboards and taped lines on them, later silkscreen printing them (another skill I had to learn). Whiteboards had not been invented yet.

I then took a nice color photo with a model of my board for school classroom scheduling, had it printed on a color post card, went to the library and got a directory of schools, copied out about 500 addresses and mailed them by hand. I was swamped with orders. I was making them at home in my basement. When a truck arrived one day with more steel chalkboards (while I was out selling) and made my wife unload the truck in the driveway, with our three little kids in tow, I came home to find them all over the driveway. Of course, she kicked me out of the basement and I had to get my first production facility which was a little store front on South Ave. in a poor neighborhood. I was there for one year, 1969. I worked alone there 12 to 14 hours a day but was happy a lark with my inventions and business. When a truck would show up in the street with my delivery of steel chalkboards, I would go to the local bar and hire one of the guys on the bar stools for five dollars to help me unload the truck, then would talk the city trashman into taking the crating materials which was against the rules (not an easy sell, but a few free magnets would do the trick). The next year I moved to a 2nd floor loft in an old macaroni factory, kind of an incubator for dozens of would-be entrepreneurs with dreams and schemes. It was a zoo, and I could do a whole book that would keep you laughing for hours about my year and a half in that place. I knew absolutely nothing about manufacturing but just asked questions wherever I thought I could get answers. I bought an old Davidson offset printing press, and read the manual to learn how to print my first brochures. I bought an antique Verirtyper for fifteen dollars to set my first type. Even did all my own mailing (some really funny stories there too).

WOW. I certainly hope Mr. Krapf writes his book, because it's the most inspiring bit of business storytelling I've ever read. It reminds me of Richard Feynman's autobiography, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman, one of my favorite books for its humor, personality, and insight.

For those of you checking your credit card limits, a caveat: I haven't yet ordered anything from Magnatag, as I don't have the space for a whiteboard, so I can't say I've hefted their boards or written on their magnets. They sell direct from their factory, and don't seem to use retailers like Staples. I imagine that they're used everywhere, taken for granted as reliable pieces of functional architecture in businesses and organizations across America. If someone in the Boston area spots one, let me know! I want to check out the construction and finish, and through that, get some closure on this story :-)

Flat Pens and Moleskines

Last week I wrote about these flat bookmark pens I got at Barnes & Noble. I finally got a chance to use them "in the field" during Barcamp Manchester, tucking one into a thin moleskine cahier journal. It was quite convenient, and I discovered that the flexing of the pen body was actually an advantage: it doesn't break when you sit on it! At least, so far it hasn't.

The one complaint I had was not due to the pen; the cahier is a very flimsy notebook to write on while standing up. So today I stuck a flat pen in the regular moleskine pocket notebook---the one that fits in your back pocket---to see just how much of a problem it would be.

As it turns out, it's not so bad if you put the pen in the middle, clipped to one of the manilla folder inserts (it's a thin cardboard as opposed to regular paper). The bottom of the pen tends to move around though; I might use a small loop of paper or sponge to help keep the pen in place. The cover does bend alarmingly, comforming itself around the pen, but I think the moleskine can probably hold up to it. Time will tell.

The picture above shows the cahier notebook on top, and the pocket notebook on the bottom.

Flat Pens Revisited

Just about a year ago, I was obsessed with making a flat pen that would fit into a book or journal. A flat pen, I reasoned, would allow the pages of a book to "flow" better.

I finally stumbled upon some readily available ones right at Barnes & Noble, which commenter Claire had first brought to my attention the last time I was penhunting in Boston. Thanks for the tip, Claire!

The flattened pen is about 4.5 inches long, 7/16th of an inch wide, and a mere 1/8th inch thick. The clip adds another 1/16ths of an inch to the thickness, but still lies flat. While the build quality is a little on the light side, it's a pretty stable writing instrument for short sessions. There's some flex in the pen body if you exert some force on it, but it's one step above the usual cheap-o novelty pen. They are also prettier than the folding wallet pen I saw on LifeHacker.

Each pen was stamped "patented" with the mark "Slip Grippa", which lead to the manufacturer's website. If you're looking for tsotchkes to give away at a tradeshow, you can order them in a variety of colors from Grippa, singly or in packs. You can order them customized with your own logo and any one of 29 colors (PMS color matching is available too). Perusing the website, I saw that they also have a metal version that might have a more substantial feel. I'll have to get a hold of one and try it out.

If you're near a Barnes & Noble, the flat pens are packaged as bookmark pens and cost $4.95 for a CD-style case of 8. I've heard a rumor that they're also available at some drugstores.

UPDATE: So you want to see what they look like inside a moleskine?

Swiss Watchmakers and The Invisible Clock II

When I was in Harvard Square for a meeting last week, I happened to notice The Swiss Watchmaker on Church Street. I popped into the store and looked around, and was struck by the matter-of-fact quality of the place. What was especially cool was that there was some kind of lesson going on behind the counter between a master watchmaker and two students. There was old-school craftsmanship was going on. Not having thousands of dollars to spend, I ducked out but noted this store's existence for future reference.

This weekend I was in the Square again, this time to hang out with my sister and her boyfriend. I had gotten in a little early, so I had some time to wander by the Swiss Watchmaker. I noticed a sun-faded sign in the window advertising something called The Invisible Clock II, which featured all kinds of alarm and timing modes. Always on the look for interesting time-keeping gadgets, I decided to drop in and ask to see the unit.

The Invisible Clock II

Being a Saturday, the store was a little more relaxed feeling. I spoke to one fellow named "Moose", who was happy to tell me all about The Invisible Clock II. It's a light but fairly-rugged feeling unit, powered by one AAA battery. It's about the size of a small pager, and comes with a belt clip. It's primary raison d'etre is to keep track of time intervals. Here's what it does:

• It keeps track of up to 12 distinct daily alarms, which can vibrate or beep in different settable patterns.

• It has a countdown timer that can be see to go off once or repeat, vibrating or beeping at any interval you want. It goes as low as 3 seconds, or as high as 999 hours. I was thinking it might be good for 15-minute interval timing.

• It has a special Custom Timer mode that allows you to set a master interval, with up to 6 unique alarms within that interval. It will count up or count down, and it can be set to repeat auotmatically.

• It's got a Meeting Timer, which you set for an interval for the length of the meeting. It will go off 50% of the way through the meeting, with 5 minutes to go, and then when time's up. Each alert has a distinct pattern of vibration or beeping.

• It also works as a regular clock with date and as a stopwatch.

• It has a cool electroluminescent backlit display. Yum!

• It has a lanyard loop, so you could attach it to yourself in some fashion in addition to using the belt clip holster.

On the down side, it only has 4 input buttons, so programming this thing is like solving a puzzle in a puzzle-adventure game like Myst. Moose spent some time showing me how the programming worked, following the instruction in the 4-page instructional pamphlet. I asked him what people tended to use it for, and he said people who needed to take medicine at certain times, professionals who needed to time sessions, people who ran meetings, and so on. I myself just wanted it to remind me to keep track of what I was doing with [The Emergent Task Timer][ett] when I was away from my desk, plus I was attracted to the re-invention of the timer into a small device. At $45.00 it wasn't cheap, but the day I was in the store happened to coincide with a Sales Tax Holiday in Massachussetts. Swiss Watchmaker has a 10-day return policy, so I figured I could at least try it out and return it if I really didn't find it that useful. You can get the device for slightly cheaper at Time Now's website. They also sell on eBay.

I'm a little concerned about the quality of the side switch, which is used to set BEEP, VIBRATE or OFF mode, which you can see here is a pretty ordinary looking. I guess I am spoiled by the sealed slider-type switches you see on mobile phones. Other than that, the unit seems pretty solidly built. I'm going to try it for a week and see if it really helps.

Swiss Watchmakers

As I got ready to leave, I chatted with Moose a bit to learn a bit more about the store, and he was very passionate about what they did. The Swiss Watchmaker in Harvard Square is, from what I gather, one of a few very specialized establishments in the world that is capable of servicing the world's high-end watches.

• They can cut parts from scratch if they have to; unlike a lot of places, they have the guys right there in the store.
• The energy in the place is so rare to find these days: actual artisans and craftspeople who have studied for years to master their craft.
• Moose told me some cool stories about the decline of watchmaking even in the large established companies; one gold-plated brandname he described as now having "more lawyers than watchmakers" now. He informed me how a good mechanical watch kept better time than your average "quartz" watch, which can lose up to 15 seconds per month and still be regarded as "accurate". He described the process of adjusting a quality mechanical watch; each one has its own kind of characteristics based on its internal friction, and you adjust it based on that. Once you've found it, it keeps great time, but you need to let it sit for a while and watch it for a week.
• He also told me his opinion on the excellence of one particular watch he was excited about that was a tremendous value compared to more pricy watches, waterproof down to something insane like a kilometer (I may have misheard that). He explained why the winding knob was on the other side of the face: it's because when you bend your wrist, you don't want it to poke into your hand and break. Apparently, some people think it's because you wear it on your other arm, and Moose made a slight exasperated noise to indicate what he thought of that idea.

Clearly, Moose was a man who was passionate about watches. The next time I buy anything even remotely related to watches, I'm going to check out this place first. They had some specialized stopwatches that might also be suitable for task timing, but I didn't have time to look at them. Moose invited me to come down and talk watches anytime; he said something like, "think of this store as a working museum", which was an excellent way of describing the shop. I just love places like this.