Happy Mail: Rhodia Drive Anniversary Giveaway Prize

Back just before Thanksgiving, I had a very happy mail day.  Stephanie over at Rhodia Drive (one of my favorite blogs, even BEFORE the giveaway) held a giveaway to celebrate the third anniversary of her blog, and I actually won one of the prizes!  

The prizes were supplied by the fine folks at Exaclair, makers of excellent European paper and pen products. This particular prize package included a Rhodia dot grid Webnotebook, a package of multicolored Exacompta index cards, and a small folio just right for tucking the cards into.

All these products are new to me, so I'll be posting reviews of the Webnotebook and the cards very soon!  (The folio is nice, and well made, but it's just a folio -- so not much reviewing there!)

George Herbert on Thanksgiving: Calligraphy Practice

Wanting to get some calligraphy practice in, and wanting a quote relevant to this time of year, I happened upon this beautiful quote by the English poet George Herbert.  I was just playing around with it, and interested mainly in practicing the letters, so the line breaks are not where they need to be.  Still, I was pleased with the way it turned out.

(Moon Palace Sumi Ink, Mitchell Elbow Copperplate Nib, Rhodia paper)

It's a little early still, but Happy Thanksgiving!

Review: Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine

The minute the news came out about the Evernote Smart Notebook, I knew I was going to have to have one.  And I was very pleasantly surprised by this great notebook.  It has already become one of my daily companions.

Made by Moleskine, the styling of this notebook is exquisite.  The eye-catching cover is embossed with various life and productivity symbols (including the iconic Evernote elephant right in the center), and it's definitely been a topic of conversation with everyone who has seen my notebook.  The lime green ribbon marker and elastic closure are perfect touches as well.

 (Turns out that it's really hard to get a picture that captures all the details of this notebook, including the beautiful embossing on the front.  So I tweaked the photo to bring the embossing details out.)

The paper is typical Moleskine notebook paper, which is to say: smooth and beautiful, but average in how it deals with various pens.  Wet-writing pens, including fountain pens, are always going to bleed through this paper, but there doesn't seem to be excessive amounts of feathering with it.

(I wrote the beginnings of this post in the notebook.  Seemed appropriate, somehow!)

The thing that makes this notebook worth the money is the included stickers and built-in tagging system.  In my testing, they work perfectly to help categorize pages in the notebook as they are uploaded to your Evernote account.  Here's how they work:  First you choose a sticker that suits the particular category of your writing.  (If none of the pre-assigned sticker categories do it for you, the categories can be easily reassigned inside the Evernote mobile app.)  I used the "work" sticker and reassigned it to my Evernote "Blog" notebook with a "pens" tag.  Then I took a picture of the page with a sticker on it.  I have to say that the "page camera" option in the Evernote app does not take beautiful pictures, as a rule.  For getting information into your Evernote account, it's good enough, though.  Perhaps the page camera will improve with later versions of the software.

Now here's the insanely cool part.  The minute I uploaded these pictures to my Evernote account, the system used the sticker to automatically put the picture into the correct notebook, along with the associated tag.  It's a completely seamless process, and it works REALLY well.  Now I have handwritten pages in the cloud, as well as in a physical notebook, which is a comforting thing from an OCD standpoint.

(It's kind of fun to stick the little stickers on the page.  They can go anywhere on the page and still work, supposedly, but I thought they needed to go in the top right corner.  Don't ask me why.)

This got me to wondering... do the stickers and the automatic tagging process work with pages from an ordinary notebook?  Interestingly (and understandably, for the sake of Evernote's and Moleskine's bottom line), the answer is no.  In my tests, pictures of pages from other notebooks went into my normal default Evernote notebook, even with the sticker present.  There is evidently a special code built into the pages of the Moleskine notebook -- it seems to be the pattern of dots that constitute the lines on the page (both in the ruled and grid versions).  I must point out that the company says as much in their promotional materials, and it is indeed true.

(The ribbon bookmark is a much prettier green and is much more striking than my crappy picture suggests.)

All in all, I can highly recommend these notebooks.  Right now, they appear to be available only from Moleskine (via their website).  The notebooks are not cheap, but for what they do and how they are made, I think they are well worth the price.  In addition, the notebook comes with 3 free months of Evernote Premium.  If you are already a premium subscriber, as I am, the code that is pasted in the back of the notebook simply extends your existing subscription by 3 months.  This is a pretty good value, and definitely defrays some of the cost of the notebook.

In short, fans of Moleskines and Evernote should take the next natural step and combine the two to help with capturing anything and everything that can be put on a page.

The Field Notes Colors Subscription Begins

A few days ago I received a small but bulky package in the mail, and here's what was inside:

A family portrait, of sorts.

These notebooks are simply some of the best.  Also great are the free pen (I love Field Notes pens because they are traditional, no-frills ballpoints that JUST WRITE) and the button tied to the "Traveling Salesman" theme of the current notebooks (on the right in the picture).  All told, a very happy mail day, and I will be reviewing the TS notebooks soon.

Anyone else get these notebooks in the mail recently?

JetPens Order: Happiness!

I recently placed an order from the incomparable JetPens.  I ordered some pens that caught my eye and ones that I wanted to try out.  I also ordered a pack of green ink cartridges for my Pilot Parallel Pen.  Here's a picture of the loot!

From left to right:
Pentel Vicuna ballpoint, 0.7 mm, black body and ink
Zebra Sarasa Clip, 0.7 mm, brown ink (This pen is amazing -- it's like writing with liquid chocolate.)
Uniball Signo 0.38 mm, bordeaux black (The ink of this pen is essentially a reddish-black.  Or a blackish red.  Either way, it's an interesting color!)
Uniball Signo 0.38 mm, green-black (Same as above, but in green.  I REALLY like this color of ink.)
Zebra SL-F1 mini ballpoint pen, 0.7 mm, navy body, black ink
Pentel TRFS Tradio mini fountain pen, M nib, black body, refillable
Platinum Preppy fountain pen, F nib, refillable

It may take me a little while, but I plan to post reviews of all of these great pens!

Review: Sharpie Pen - Stainless Steel

I have always wanted to like the Sharpie pens, ever since they first came out in their "won't bleed through paper formulation."  I have used Sharpie markers in the lab forever, it seems, and I even had an advisor in graduate school who wrote with the markers routinely, as he helped me plan out experiments on paper.  Those markers bleed through paper like crazy, of course, because that's not what they are designed for, but he didn't care.  That was the only kind of Sharpie available back then, and we always had lots of Sharpies sitting around the lab (and likely as not, the "piece of paper" would actually be a paper towel, and EVERYTHING bleeds through a paper towel).

But of course, I am always on the quest for the holy Daily Writer (DW), and the Sharpie pen is beautiful enough that it always catches my eye in the store.  However, I can't like the Sharpie pen for it to ever be a serious contender for the DW.  There are lots of reasons for this, and I have not come to this decision lightly.  For one thing, it's a felt-tip pen.  My earliest recollection of trying to like a felt-tip pen was when the Flair pens came out in my childhood.  I didn't and don't like them either, although I will grant you that a Sharpie pen is head and shoulders above a Flair.  It's mostly an occupational reason: I deal with 3-part NCR forms on a routine, if not daily, basis. Felt-tip pens are usually not suitable for these kinds of forms because they require a certain amount of pressure to make the transfer to the sheets underneath.  So when I have to fill out one of these forms, it's always a ballpoint for me.  (Maybe I should experiment with one of the Sharpie pens and see if it might possibly work?)

(Do you think this point would stand up to an NCR form?)

Then there's the Sharpie pen's ink.  I am admittedly not that adventuresome when it comes to ink.  Black is ALWAYS my first choice, and then green and red (in that order), mostly because of my occupational need of marking up stuff and grading tests.  (Blue is never an option, although in the past I have been observed buying blue pens in a fit of insanity -- but these are always pens I have to throw out or give away later, because I never actually want to write with them.)

So black it is.  But it has to be the darkest, truest black that there ever was.  Blacker than the outer reaches of space, or the heart of the most evil person on Earth.  I find myself pining for the black ink that Rudyard Kipling required for his writing.  And here is where the Sharpie pen falls short most grievously, in my book.  The ink goes on the page fairly black, but it quickly dries to a lighter shade of black, verging towards a dark gray.  Dark gray will never be black, to me.  I suppose it has to do with the "no bleed through" formulation of the ink, since Sharpie marker ink writes jet black and stays jet black.

All the Sharpie pens are beautiful -- their style is consistently one of their best features.  This one is no exception: the sleek, attractive stainless steel body, the small black button endcaps that subtly tell you the color of the ink inside the pen, and the slightly cushy rubbery grip.  The whole pen feels good in the hand, and it's lightweight enough to write with for hours.  For what they are, the Sharpie pens do what they advertise.  But they are not anywhere near the competition in the quest for the Daily Writer.

Sorry, Sharpie pen!  We can definitely be casual friends, but that's about all you can expect from me.

 (This ink probably would not have been black enough for Mr. Gandhi, either.)

Ratings:

Style: A

Ink: C (black is not black enough)

Writing: B+ (smooth enough for a felt-tip pen, lightweight in the hand)

Blobbiness: A+ (not really a problem with felt-tip pens)

Chance that this will become a Daily Writer: 0%

Review: Zebra Z-Mulsion EX Pen

A couple of days ago I received a fantastic surprise in the mail from the good people at shoplet.com: a sample of a Zebra Z-Mulsion EX ballpoint pen.  I was excited because I rarely receive these kinds of things in the mail, but then I was doubly excited when I started writing with this pen.

Where do I even start with a pen like this?  I'll start with the smoothness, which is obviously supposed to be a big selling point with this model.  It is REALLY smooth.  I mean, like velvet, gliding on ice, greased lightning smooth.  It's really kind of amazing.  Many pens aspire to this level of smoothness but this is one that really succeeds.  According to the pen's description on Shoplet.com, the ink is an emulsion of oil, water, and pigment that is supposed to provide "an unbelievably smooth writing experience."  I am here to tell you that this is NOT hyperbole, folks.  It is noticeably smoother than lots of other pens in its class.  Plus, with the admittedly limited testing I have already put this pen through, it does not produce the typical ink blobs that many other smooth writers seem to produce.  [Edit: See the pic below.  In my enthusiasm, I spoke too soon.  This is such a wet writer that its "blobbiness" is in line with other pens like it.  But to me it's not an excessive blobbiness, certainly not along the messy lines of a PaperMate InkJoy pen, so I still recommend this pen highly.]  Because of its wet ink, as with most pens of this sort there is a small piece of plastic covering the tip to prevent drying out before the first use.

Added to this is the fact that its black ink (the model I got) is a true, dark black.  The 1.0 mm ballpoint is a perfect match for the fluidity of the ink and the density of the pigment.  I am eager to try out other colors in the line to see if they are in the same class ink-wise.  (Note that blue and red ink versions are also available on Shoplet.com, but there are more colors shown on the promotional card I received.  I'll definitely be looking around for the green in particular.)

The styling of the pen is hard to see from my crappy pictures, but I will say that it looks very sophisticated, and feels good in the hand.   It is also very, very light (perhaps almost TOO light, but we won't quibble about things like that -- that will simply make it good to write with for long periods of time).

The only negative that I could possibly say about this pen (and I will say up front that this is VERY quibbly) is the click mechanism.  It's good and solid in terms of how it works, which is overall quite well, but when the plunger is pushed down and the pen is extended, the plunger tends to want to flop up and down and around with a cheap sound as you move the pen.  Like I said, this is just IMPOSSIBLY quibbly, and I realize this, but it is noticeable and it may be a deal-breaker for some people -- although I seriously doubt it.  This is such a great overall pen that the clicker sound is something I can definitely overlook.

Ratings:
Style: A
Ink: A+, black (at least) is dark and true
Writing: A+, very smooth and gliding
Blobbiness: B- (produces some typical ink blobs but they are bearable)
Chance that this will become a daily carry pen: 95%

You should definitely check out the Zebra Z-Mulsion EX Ballpoint Pen today!