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?

Posted by at 08:21 PM in Design Arts | Link |
  1. Levenger’s sells a thingy that has a space for a Palm gizmo (this is clearly my day for linguistic precision) on one side and a notepad on the other. I don’t think this notepad is ideal, but it does seem to me that the ideal carry-along notebook would have both paper and a Palm, because the Palm stores so much—addresses, calendar, let’s see: one friend carries hers with a screen of med info to flash at the ER staff if she’s too ill to speak, which calamity has happened to her. Stuff like that.

    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?)
    — Ron Sullivan    17. August 2006, 09:14    Link
  2. Pica, why not simply use any sketchbook you like the look and feel of, with paper good enough to draw or paint on, and use that as your journal? You can put the date in as you go, sketch in it, write in it, paste things into it, keep track of phone numbers, appointments, whatever. Why should a journal need to be bought as such rather than created?
    — Natalie    19. August 2006, 17:39    Link

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