16 August 06
Days
Nicole of Turning Leaves recently posted about her French diary-journal, her agenda, and how she gets her mother to send her a refill from France every year. It works for her.
I used to have the Economist diary, a slim leather affair my father bought me every year for my birthday. I fell prey to the 1980s Filofax craze in England and loved the modularity of it, how much stuff I could put in one place. I got sent by my work to a Franklin Planner course when I was at Harvard, and got the larger leather case to hold it all. Now I was lugging around four pounds of planning in my bike basket, and when Handspring Visors appeared, I was thrilled to make the transition to a tiny thing.
But it doesn’t work for me, the PDA, because there’s nowhere to write stuff down when you’re on the phone, there’s nowhere to sketch. It’s sterile and, when it goes south (which they inevitably do), you’re stuck. Numenius promises he’ll download all my data onto his Linux box but so far I’m living at the edge of my backup-module. I’d lose all my addresses if my Visor stopped working. The last printout I have is probably from 2001. Almost everyone I know has moved since then.
In any case, I switched back to the Franklin Planner I had in the cupboard, because I like to be able to use a pen. It’s pared down—no address list, for instance—but it still takes up real estate in my bike basket. It’s not something I would take on a trip, for instance.
The perfect diary for me isn’t something you can buy in a store, though it doesn’t mean I’ll stop looking (and I will certainly look when we’re in Spain in a couple of weeks, though how you make that a sustainable thing, I don’t know).
The perfect diary would have room to write and draw and even paint. I think I’m talking myself into making my own. Ideas, anyone?
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I had a Palm Pilot for awhile, got it free from a friend who couldn’t use it. Handy, but no you sure can’t take notes in a hurry. I still use the Palm desktop I downloaded for it as my computer address etc. storage spot. The Palm did hitch up to the Mac and I could transfer info fast, which was handy. It did finally croak, though; you’re right about that. C’mon, Numenius, give Pica some backup there.
When they get around to inventing it, the ideal palmtop device will be flat enough to serve as the cover of a refillable real paper notebook, and have a chip voice recorder built in. I’d load it with fieldguides.
And a GPS unit, cameraphone, and iPod too, I guess, but hey. And coffeemaker. Replicator? Oh, and it’ll be solar- and motion-powered.
(Motion-powered isn’t hard; Joe has a motion-powered “self-winding” watch that must be 40 years old. Why aren’t they making those any more?)