PicoPad

I found a nifty new tool today. In my constant productivity quests one of my bigger hangups has been carrying pen and paper with me. I found something today at a local bookstore that seems interesting.


I typically have my messenger bag with me, and in it a number of different surfaces to write something on, along with plenty of writing utencils. However there are a lot of times that I have something occur to me when I am somehow away from my man-bag. This new tool comes into play for that. It is called PicoPad, and its such a simple concept that it could pretty much be done in a homemade style, but cheap enough it's just as easy to buy it. It's a piece of plasticy cardboard folded in half, with what is basically the top half of a post-it pad inside.

The part that is perhaps most ingenious though is the pen. It's pretty much a short pen refill with a small piece of the same plasticy cardboard attached to it that creates wings you can hold onto, and in the cover there is a slot to hold it. The whole thing is about the size of a stack of a half dozen business cards, so if you throw away some of the crap in your wallet you know you should throw away anyway, it will probably fit.

Simple, elegant, and ingenious.

The Elements of Style

I love this book

I found it from reading about writing, and more specifically people blogging about Stephen King's On Writing, and later reading the book myself.

It's a great handbook on what to and not to do when writing. To start, it's short. It is around 100 pages and is significantly longer than it was when William Strunk originally wrote it. EB White (yes that EB White) was a student of Strunk who wrote a very terse text for his class. Years later White added to it, and with a little bit of modernization, the book exists today in it's fourth edition. It's to the point, and perhaps could be considered a bit rude, but most good English teachers are. The first part, which is what Strunk wrote, is pretty much a drill sargent issuing orders. These are simple points like

"2. Enclose parenthetic expressions between commas."
"6. Do not break sentences in two."

The later parts, mostly written by White, highlight issues related to overall form, like using paragraphs, using the active voice, be clear, and one of the most important, omit needless words. Good writing is simple.

I'm still not sure why none of my English instructors have ever told me about this before.