But What If You Lose The $100 Pen?
David Pogue at the New York Times has an article that profiles several products that are designed to help you keep track of everything you write down. Silly me, I thought paper is what let you keep track of everything you write down. No, it turns out that they make pens that capture your scribbles as a digital image and then either store them as JPEGs on a flash drive, or, like, automatically e-mail them to you or something. I don’t know the details because I couldn’t be bothered to read the entire story.
Such a pen has numerous uses and potential markets, but I’m not really sure which is the primary one. Is it for people who are so wired that they need every thought that occurs in their Starbucks-addled brains to be saved in electronic form, rather than on a piece of paper? I suppose, but those people already have BlackBerrys and iPhones and all sorts of other toys that let you type out your thoughts with ease. I, for one, composed an entire short story on my BlackBerry earlier this year while waiting for the subway. (Let's just say that this story killed when I read it to my colleagues back in May.)
Maybe the magic pen is for people who can’t be bothered to retype their hand-written notes into a computer. We’re all aware of how much more useful a Word document is than a piece of paper with the same words on it. I can’t delete my own illegible scrawls, or make them italics, or spell-check them at the click of a button. Not that I need to; my writing is perfect. Nonetheless, I again question how useful the digital pen is for these customers. It will take just as long to transfer a few JPEG files and re-read them as it would to unfold a post-it or cocktail napkin and retype it. And Pogue says the handwriting recognition software is not any good, so you’ll have to retype anyway.
However, I can offer a personal experience that provides another use for this piece of hardware, and that’s for making a backup copy of whatever you’re writing down. I cannot describe how annoyed I was in March when I lost the journal that I had been keeping for some six months, after leaving it at Central Library in downtown Los Angeles during spring break.
Have you seen me?
This was not a journal in the sense that it contained my deepest, most personal thoughts, mostly because I do not have any thoughts like that. No one will stumble upon my journal in the library stacks and be embarrassed on my behalf after they read about my schoolgirl crush on Jock McKevin, the captain of the football team. Even though he is really dreamy.
No, my journal was a repository of randomly jotted notes, mostly story ideas and some elaborated thoughts for essays and other writings. The loss of this document was devastating. The whole point of writing all those ideas down was so that I could return to them later on without having to remember them in my brain. My brain is barely able to remember what I told my boss to do ten minutes ago, let alone some crazy short story idea about a robot ninja dinosaur that I thought up while sitting on a plane to Burbank back in November. THAT'S WHY I FUCKING WROTE IT DOWN. SO I WOULDN'T HAVE TO REMEMBER.
Artist's rendering ©2008.
Ah, well. If only they had invented the USB pen before last March. Because, you see, I also had written down in that steno pad some fascinating ideas for posts on this very blog. But you will never get to enjoy them, my darling readers, because they are lost to eternity now, thanks to my bungling ineptitude and the unfriendliness of the Los Angeles Public Library's lost-and-found department.
And that's just sad.
Such a pen has numerous uses and potential markets, but I’m not really sure which is the primary one. Is it for people who are so wired that they need every thought that occurs in their Starbucks-addled brains to be saved in electronic form, rather than on a piece of paper? I suppose, but those people already have BlackBerrys and iPhones and all sorts of other toys that let you type out your thoughts with ease. I, for one, composed an entire short story on my BlackBerry earlier this year while waiting for the subway. (Let's just say that this story killed when I read it to my colleagues back in May.)
Maybe the magic pen is for people who can’t be bothered to retype their hand-written notes into a computer. We’re all aware of how much more useful a Word document is than a piece of paper with the same words on it. I can’t delete my own illegible scrawls, or make them italics, or spell-check them at the click of a button. Not that I need to; my writing is perfect. Nonetheless, I again question how useful the digital pen is for these customers. It will take just as long to transfer a few JPEG files and re-read them as it would to unfold a post-it or cocktail napkin and retype it. And Pogue says the handwriting recognition software is not any good, so you’ll have to retype anyway.
However, I can offer a personal experience that provides another use for this piece of hardware, and that’s for making a backup copy of whatever you’re writing down. I cannot describe how annoyed I was in March when I lost the journal that I had been keeping for some six months, after leaving it at Central Library in downtown Los Angeles during spring break.
Have you seen me?
This was not a journal in the sense that it contained my deepest, most personal thoughts, mostly because I do not have any thoughts like that. No one will stumble upon my journal in the library stacks and be embarrassed on my behalf after they read about my schoolgirl crush on Jock McKevin, the captain of the football team. Even though he is really dreamy.
No, my journal was a repository of randomly jotted notes, mostly story ideas and some elaborated thoughts for essays and other writings. The loss of this document was devastating. The whole point of writing all those ideas down was so that I could return to them later on without having to remember them in my brain. My brain is barely able to remember what I told my boss to do ten minutes ago, let alone some crazy short story idea about a robot ninja dinosaur that I thought up while sitting on a plane to Burbank back in November. THAT'S WHY I FUCKING WROTE IT DOWN. SO I WOULDN'T HAVE TO REMEMBER.
Artist's rendering ©2008.
Ah, well. If only they had invented the USB pen before last March. Because, you see, I also had written down in that steno pad some fascinating ideas for posts on this very blog. But you will never get to enjoy them, my darling readers, because they are lost to eternity now, thanks to my bungling ineptitude and the unfriendliness of the Los Angeles Public Library's lost-and-found department.
And that's just sad.
posted by M at 9:47 PM
2 Comments:
I just have to say, that robot ninja dinosaur is fucking badass.
I hate writing with pens. If they sold a pencil I would be sold. Also I would prefer to use a scanner to preserve my writings. I do most of my writing on the computer anyway.
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