I'm a bit chagrinned to admit that having been mired in details I failed to see the obvious.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/06/19/politics/p06...

Why is it even mildly scandalous that Barack Obama said that he'd take public money and then decided not to? Are there restrictions attached to the Presidential Campaign Fund that he doesn't have to abide? Or is it just that it theoretically looks bad for the other candidate to have his hand in the public cookie jar while he doesn't?

Another word that I understood only from contextual clues. «His word carries a lot of clout» implies import and respect. This is how the word is most often used, in my experience. I've begun reading Stephen King's On Writing. Just a few pages in he writes something about seeing babysitters and nannies «wind up and clout the kids». It occurred to me with the violence of an idea one should have known all along, that there might be more to the meaning of the word than I had given credit.

It's morning in El Cerrito---or is it Albany? I've never been certain about the borders here in the East Bay. I stopped at a Shell station to get fuel for the Guzzi and a little caffeine for myself.

Across San Pablo from me is a policeman who has pulled over a bicyclist. The bicyclist has a trailer attached to her bike, and the trailer has a trash barrel on it and some rakes and tools.

It looks like the two of them are flirting. There's casual conversation, laughter.

Pilot is quickly becoming my favorite pen manufacturer and my least favorite pen company at the same time. Their design and attention to detail is remarkable, their quality control appears to be currently unparalleled in the industry, and their prices run on the low side compared to pens of similar quality of design. In these regards, Pilot is making most of the rest of the industry look bad. What's the catch? Pilot USA won't sell these pens.

The newest addition to Pilot's line-up is the Stella 90s, a squarish-ended lacquer-over-brass fountain pen with a 14 karat gold nib and a ¥10,000 pricetag. As of this writing, that's approximately $96 US Dollars, which is a very reasonable price for a good-quality fountain pen with a 14K nib. The only way you can buy this pen in the US is to purchase from a specialty import store, or to get one from an eBay seller. Like most of Pilot's fountain pen line, Pilot USA will not be

I'd originally thought to title this post «Back to Paper», but the thing is, I've never before really used a paper organizer or calendar. I've tried a few over the years, of course, but nothing really took. In 1993 I gave up on keeping a paper address book and began recording names, numbers, birthdays and addresses on my desktop computer using OS/2 2.0's «Database», a rudimentary form-builder that was part of its collection of productivity applications, along with sticky notes, notepad, and calculator. Sadly, it was not really meant to last, as the «productivity» collection turned up conspicuously absent in OS/2 «Warp» 3. I agonized over a means of exporting the data to some other format, but it was not to be, and I had to start over. It's fifteen years later now and there is still information that was lost in that upgrade: people I lost touch with, birthdays and anniversaries I don't know because they were lost.

A smarter man than myself might have sworn off of digital personal information management right then, but instead

The Parker '51' is in many ways the pinnacle of fountain pen design. The '51' looked forward in a way the industry has not seen since. Yes, there have been steps forward, but many of those technological advancements have furthered older designs rather than reinventing the fountain pen, the way Parker did when it developed the '51' in the late 1930's and early 1940's. So it should be no surprise that the history of this important pen would be recorded for our enjoyment.

Finally some good news in my ongoing hard drive drama. After removing the Seagate drive from the Acomdata enclosure and placing it into a new enclosure (a Macally, if anyone cares) the hard drive that I lost during the wind-and-rainstorm here January 4th is now back online. I've already told Photoshop to use it as the scratch disk and started Photoshop opening the magenta channel of my latest project. It's still going to be a long process, but hopefully there won't be so much of the waiting an hour and a half for a process to die when the scratch disk fills. Waiting an hour and a half to process an image I can take. Waiting not to process an image is frustrating.

Inadequacies of Writing Instrument Design and Manufacture is the follow-up to Geoff Roe's earlier Technical History. Similarly to that book, this one is quite brief. The material originated as a lecture to the Writing Instrument Society in London. Not only do I have a late start on my challenge to read fifty-two books this year, I'm also quite a bit behind in getting these reviews out. So here in the end of March I'm reporting the first of fifty-two books this year, one that according to my notes I finished on February 27th. I've got more than a little catching up to do.

I came across a very small reproduction of this advertisement while reading David and Mark Shepherd's Parker '51'. Although the Parker 61 fountain pen is mentioned only briefly in their book about the iconic '51', the use of Norman Rockwell illustrations in Parker's advertisements was too important to ignore even if they were for the «wrong» pen. The 61 is one of my favorite pens, and I daresay I like mine better than my '51'. With a little searching, I found a copy of the Saturday Evening Post from October 1959.