As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve set aside the ball point and gone back to a fountain pen. This morning I actually remembered to throw my pen case in my briefcase.

So I opened the case just now and grabbed my Pelikan M200. It wrote perfectly. No tapping the nib to get things started. No licking (yuk) the nib to losen up dried ink. It just wrote like I’d just set it down. The last time that pen was used was January 5th.

My interest in and use of fountain pens rises and falls I’m not certain, but I think the seasons have something to do with it.

Regardless, long about Christmas time my journal shows I dumped my awesome Pelikan M200 with home-ground italic nib to pick up the venerable Fisher AG7 space pen. Both pens are reliable writers with good memories, but I think this time around the stress of the holidays made me crave the simple bombproofness of the Fisher.

But lately I keep finding myself at work wishing I’d brought my Pelikan. I would suggest maybe that spring was in the air but for the 14 inches of snow that are due to fall today.

Regardless, it’s a good sign.

Have you tried Dragon Dictation for the iPhone? It’s a pretty remarkable app and the fact that it is free is even more remarkable. If you’re looking for a way to record your thoughts in spoken form and automatically convert them into written form then this app is for you.

I haven’t used this app a lot because even though it does a pretty darn good job of converting my speech into text, I find that I don’t usually speak the way that I write. But it might just get me to change the way I speak .

I also haven’t learned all of the commands for punctuation, but ‘period’ and ‘newline’ work just fine.

Now I think I’ve seen everything: a hypnosis CD to improve handwriting. .

I think the M200 is probably one of the most practical fountain pens out there. It’s built well, is a tolerable size, and holds a nice amount of ink. The pen is an OEM design start to finish, and it’s a functional one. It has a lot going for it, and that’s the reason why I’ve been carrying two of them for the past eight months.

Pelikan M200 Fountain Pens

The size is small. Smaller than I would like – the M600 is really the ideal size for me. I have an M800, and while it is impressive and fun to write with, it starts to feel too large – like I’m compensating for something. But the M200 while a tad small is a very usable size and is slim enough to fit in pen holders that won’t tolerate larger pens. The grip is an appropriate distance from the tip of the nib, and there is a nice window for checking the ink level.

The clip is strong, although not with a lot of clearance. It will be fine in suit pockets, but I would hesitate to clip it on many jacket pockets that have thicker trim, or on a thick leather pen loop. The clip is a spring design, so it has the potential to fatigue and break over time.

Unlike the rest of the series, the M200 doesn’t have the ‘rust ring’ just above the nib. I prefer this. I’m not always very fastidious about how clean my pens are, and I’ve had a Cross Townsend pit on me there. Now I worry about the rest of my pens, and worry is about the last thing I want from any hobby.

The filling mechanism is as you would expect from Pelikan – reliable, simple, and functional. I don’t have to fill the pens every couple of days or even every week. They like almost any kind of ink, although the Richard Binder semi-flex nib  I have in the yellow one prefers ’safe’ inks that flow a little better than the boutique inks. Of course, being a piston filler it doesn’t take cartridges. So if you’re going on a several month trip to bush country you’d better pack a bottle of ink.

In the black pen I have an italic nib I ground from a medium steel nib that originally came with the yellow pen. Another modification I made was to roughen up the grip area on the black pen with some sandpaper. It didn’t make as much of a difference as I’d hoped, and I didn’t bother on the yellow pen.

The cap is screw-on, and has multiple threads so it takes just under a revolution to unscrew. This isn’t much, and a few times I’ve either had the cap unscrew unexpectedly, or have found it with the cap off. A mental note to tighten the cap before storage has solved that problem. The cap posts perfectly – firmly attached without leaving any marks. I used to be against posting, this pen changed my mind.

This pen is a great user fountain pen. It writes very nice, is reliable, and has the looks to survive any formal encounter. But it’s not made of rare materials, nor is it very expensive ($80 give or take, with nib) and between the cost, materials, and interchangeable nibs it encourages experimentation.

Highly recommended.

In a time when there’s a lot being written about the impending death of handwriting, it’s nice to see a piece that suggests we do what we can to save it.

More on note-taking apps – from TechRadar.

Evernote seems to be the favorite, but it’s nice to see healthy competition.

Lifehacker has a nice post on note-taking methods.

A few additions:

What you take notes with can make all the difference. Whether it’s a fountain pen, software, or a pencil, experiment but go with what makes you take notes, not necessarily what’s cool.

Remember that the process of note taking has as much value as reading the notes later. In fact, for me, it’s more so. I have numerous notebooks from work that are filled with notes that were never referenced. Just taking them kept me engaged sufficiently to be successful.

Be careful with recording. It’s just so easy to hit the record button instead of taking notes, but be sure you have both the time and the personality type to make use of the recordings. For me, nothing, but nothing cures insomnia faster than a recorded lecture, and I barely have time for meetings or classes let alone twice the time – once for recording, once for review.

My last piece of advice is to never forget that you often have a choice in instructors (in a university setting, anyway), and if you find yourself struggling to take decent notes during class it may be a sign that you need a different teacher.  I’ve had some that hopped around so much it was impossible to keep up or make sensible notes of what they were trying to cover, and invariably that translated to frustration in doing assignments & exams later. School’s hard & expensive enough without begging for extra trouble, and don’t be afraid to shift your schedule to get better instructors.

Moleskine has a new planner format: Panoramic. I’m not sure it really lives up to the term ‘panoramic’, but it’s a neat idea. I’m probably going to be shopping for a new planner, as I use them for tracking workout data and as fall grows near I may head to the gym again.

What I’d like to see is a planner-style book, but designed more as a log than as a planner. I don’t know how many people use planners for recording what has happened rather than what is going to happen, but I know I do. I record my hours at work, my weight, and other useful tidbits. I know I could just use a regular notebook, but have a page/spot devoted to each day puts a little pressure on keeping up the record.

Anyway, there would be no time slots, and weekend days would be the same size as weekdays. Currently I’m using the softcover 1-page per week version, and it works pretty well. I’m on the fence about the notes page that faces the week page. Sometimes I use it, but mostly it lies blank. It would be nice to have that space added to each day.

We’ve all been there. We know we should have sent one a week or a month ago, and we have trouble deciding if it’s just too late.

Heck, these days some folks consider the written Thank You note to be optional if not old-fashioned.

The next time you’re sitting there trying to decide whether it’s been too long to send a note of thanks, keep this story in mind: TellingDad.