Month: December 2018

New Year’s Resolutions

For the last three years I’ve been making and tracking yearly goals in a Baron Fig Three-Legged Juggler Confidant. I call my new year’s resolutions my yearly goals because unlike resolutions, goals are something concrete and well defined that you continually strive to achieve.

The goals are personal, so I’m not going to share them here, but I am going to go over how I set them up, in the hopes that it might help and inspire those working on their own yearly goals.

  • Set yourself up for success by picking goals that you:
        1. Actually care about.
        1. Are measurable.
        1. Are achievable even if your year goes horribly wrong. The trick is to set up easily achievable basic goals, and then “bonus” or extended goals that go beyond them in various tiers. So if you aren’t reading at all and you want to read more a good basic goal would be “read 4 books a year”, with extended goals of “read 8 books a year”, “read 12 books a year” and so on.
        1. Are a mix of things that you track all year and one time events ( for example: participate in X number of races, and run X kilometers a month/year).
        1. Aren’t focused on one area only (to avoid boredom and burnout).
  • I use a paper notebook to track my yearly goals and the “Streaks” app to get my streaks going. The notebook is something I open and update at least once a week and so is constantly on my desk, resting against my laptop. It’s a physical and constant reminder of what I need to do. I can’t emphasize enough how important the physical aspect of putting a check mark or crossing out a box is for this to work.
  • Be ambitious only with extended goals, or you are going to disappointed and discouraged very quickly. Human beings are terrible at assessing deadlines and the amount of effort required to achieve a goal. Cut your goals by 25-50% at least from what you think you can achieve. Yes, it’ll make them easy, but the point is to create a momentum of action and success, not frustration and failure. If you know you’ve missed all or most of your goals you’ll stop looking at them, and by March 2019 you’ll be done.

This week’s long run: Running in the dark and Christmas in Haifa

I started running before 5AM this week, and so taking pictures wasn’t really an option. It was very cold, very dark, and I saw a night heron and some bats, but that’s it.

Sunrise over the Tel Aviv Marina:

Later on I went to Haifa for the Holiday of Holidays celebration, so to make up for the non existent running photos, here are some Christmas ones instead:

Ti Click EDC Pen Review

I am a big fan of Big Idea Design’s pens (the Ti Arto is my daily carry pen), and so of course I joined the Kickstarter for the Ti Click EDC Pen. Since I hadn’t tried their black anodised pens before, that’s the finish I opted for. It arrived yesterday, and even though I’ve been using it exclusively all day, I’l be the first to admit that these are only my preliminary thoughts on it. (See updates in the end for more detailed thoughts on this pen).

The packaging, as usual with BIGiDESIGN, is compact and neat. The pen comes with everything you need to fix it, should you need to (I’ve never needed to), and in a pretty nifty box.

The finish on this pen is shiny and black, but it’s surprisingly not a fingerprint magnet, as I would have imagined:

The pen came with a Scheider Gelion 39 0.4 mm gel ink refill. This is a new refill for me, and I can’t say I’m a fan. It’s as wide as a 0.7-0.8 mm refill, and I much prefer the Uni-Ball Signo UMR-85N refill that the BIGiDESIGN pens used to be shipped with (it’s me favourite gel refill).

As part of the kickstarter, the pen came with a cool Bioworkz sticker, which you can see below:

The pen itself is about the length of the Ti Arto, when the Ti Arto is capped, but the grip is much wider, about the size of the Ti Pocket Pro. That’s a bit large for an EDC pen, and it’s definitely not a pocket pen. The grip feels weird at first, but it’s very comfortable and well designed. You can see how the Ti Click EDC compares to the Ti Arto (on the left) and the Ti Pocket Pro (on the right) in the various finish options that the Ti pens come in (machined raw, midnight black, and stonewashed). My machined raw Ti Arto shows scratches much more than my stonewashed Ti Pocket Pro, but I’ve no idea yet how the midnight black finish wears.

This brings me to the only minus that the Ti Click EDC has – the click mechanism. It’s silent (no satisfying click), which will probably turn off those planning on using it as a fidget toy, and it doesn’t always engage properly. It’s especially prone to not engaging after you replace the refill. Make sure that you use the provided instructions to switch refills (and like other BIGiDESIGN pens this one accepts dozens of refills without using any spacers or requiring any special hacks), and take into account that you might have to fiddle with the grip a bit until most clicks work. This is not a minor drawback, as the whole point of the pen is its click mechanism. It should work 100% of the time and feel satisfying, not “soft” as it feels now.

For the price of the Ti Click EDC you could buy a Ti Arto (still their best pen), or a Ti Pocket Pro (if portability is super important to you), have some change for a bunch of refills and get a much better pen. I love supporting BIGiDESIGN and I’m glad that I got to try this pen, but for now it looks like the Ti Arto will continue to reign supreme in my rotation.

Update: After using this pen almost exclusively for a week, I stand by my first impressions. It’s slightly more comfortable to use in long form writing, but the click mechanism is garbage.

Update 2: The BIGiDESIGN guys contacted me and it turns out that you can significantly improve the click mechanism with some silicone grease. Using the clip fixing kit that came with the pen and their simple instructional video on how to use it you can get to the click mechanism, and then apply some silicone grease, which you can buy at Goulet Pens for example. I happened to have grease around, so I had no problem trying this out, and it fixes the problem of the click mechanism not engaging properly.

The click is now solid, but it’s still not much fun to use – there’s no satisfying click or solid feedback once the thing is engaged. You just push past a point, and then the mechanism partially bounces back. It’s a disappointment because most $2-3 pens have more satisfying click mechanisms and even Karas Kustoms EDK pen, which has a similar click mechanism, offers more feedback and an audible click once it’s engaged.

I don’t know how many Ti Click EDC pens were affected by this problem, and I’m glad that I have at least a “mostly OK” click mechanism for my pen now, but I stand by my initial review, that for a pen that advertises its click mechanism so prominently, this is not a great buy. Spend your money on the Ti Arto, it’s a pen worth having, or go for the Ti Pocket Pro if you’re looking for an EDC pen. Those are truly great pens, while the Ti Click EDC is OK to “sort of good” at best.

Field Notes Rams Review

I got these notebooks because I like Field Notes more minimalist designs, and this is most certainly one of them. I’m not a fan of dot grid though, so I’m not sure whether I’ll actually enjoy using it.

The orange highlights go well with the cream coloured covers and the grey type.

White staples, to complement the covers:

The best part of this notebook, Dieter Rams Ten Principles of Good Design:

Testing the pages a bit:

The reverse side of the page:

The Field Notes Rams edition is a utilitarian notebook that would be perfect with a Lamy 2000, provided that you’d fill the pen with something like Noodler’s Black. As it is, because of the dot grid, I have no idea when and how this edition will get into my rotation. If you prefer dot grid notebooks, this notebook is definitely worth checking out. Otherwise, the more colourful Three Missions or the more interesting Clandestine would probably be a better purchase.

How I Started Reading More (Again)

A few more insights into how I got back to reading, beyond using a reading journal, as it has come up in conversations lately (people are gearing up for 2019 resolutions, I guess):

  • I started with detective novels, easy reads, things that were fun and not too challenging to dig into. M.C. Beaton, P.G. Wodehouse, John Scalzi were my friends. I was trying to rebuild a habit, and so the last thing I needed was to start with books that I would resist reading. My mind had to learn to treat reading as a pleasant pastime and not “homework” anymore, so the more challenging books came in only about a year after I started.
  • I used streaks to challenge myself to read 10 minutes a day, every day. Why 10 minutes? Because I felt that this was the minimal amount of time required for me to start easing myself out of the choppy, constantly distracted and interrupted reading habits that I had picked up after years of using social media.
  • I deleted the Facebook and YouTube apps from my phone, and after a great deal more struggle and a few relapses, Twitter. Instead of browsing them when I had a minute or two to spare, I used the Kindle app.
  • I put reading in my new year’s resolutions (yes, I have been doing those for the last three years, and I’ve been pretty successful in meeting them for the last three years, but that’s a different post). At first it was just for a certain quantity of books (24), and then it was for a certain number of books of each kind — challenging books and long books.
  • I set up a Goodreads account and started a reading challenge there. As with the resolutions, it’s important to keep the goal not only attainable under normal circumstances, but also attainable when things go horribly wrong with your life. Start lower than you think, and ignore other people’s goals. You’re doing this for yourself. If it’s 5 books, 10 books, 20 or 20, it should be what you can do. I chose 24, because that was 2 books a month, and something that I felt I could get to without resorting to reading only short and simple books.
  • I cut out TV almost entirely from my life. This wasn’t just about reading, it was about making more time in my day for things that were more important to me, but it definitely helped with my reading. I cancelled my cable subscription and I watch about 2 hours of TV a week.

This has been my journey back into reading. Take from it what you wish, but if I can distill them they’d look like this:

  1. Decide you want to do it. If it’s not coming from you, it won’t happen.
  2. Set up systems of daily reminders and goals. These can be private or public, they can be analog or digital, as long as they help you keep on track.
  3. Make it pleasurable. Start with easy reading in a genre that you enjoy, maybe with a writer that you know, and keep your goals easy and attainable even not on the best of days.

 

This week’s long run: coot on a boat

Last week’s long run was cancelled due to horrific weather conditions, but this one was run in almost perfect conditions, as if to compensate.

Check out this great bittern all camouflaged away waiting for some unsuspecting fish to come along. He’s in the water, on the right centre side of the photo:

Geese and gulls in the sunrise:

This little coot climbed on board the peddle boat and started nosing around for something good to eat. They’re pretty shy, so it was cool seeing him so relatively clearly:

A cormorant swimming in the middle of the river:

10km done and dusted.

This Year’s Field Notes

This year’s filled up Field Notes notebooks all piled up:

And spread out:

I use them mostly for to do lists, quick capture and tracking of various short term goals. The Signature Sketchbook is full of doodles, inktober drawings and rough sketches. My favourite by far has been “Dime Novel”. My least favourite has been surprisingly “Costal”. The cover and design are gorgeous but the reticle grid is just too dark to make it enjoyable to use.