Collective work on Moleskine’s notebook
What fascinate Moleskine’s community bloggers?

Some days ago I had written a post on Analog blogs. What’s an analog blog? This is a method used to utilize your Moleskine notebook as a blog. This is a way to organize it, to link your thoughts together to be able to follow the flow of your thinking through time. It’s sure that this method is usable with other notebooks but I demonstrated the concept with Moleskines. Why? Because I lately discovered a passionate community of bloggers that write with enthusiasm about them. They write hacks to enhance their usability; they write about what they write in them, how they use them, where they use them and why they use them. They are passionate, they write on Moleskines with their guts and inspiration. Then, as a neophyte in the Moleskines world and in his immerging community, I wanted to know why they are attracted by them, and overall, why they are fascinated by Moleskines.

After I published my post, I got an unanticipated exposure. I read posts and comments from other visitors and bloggers about it. I found that people seem to love the idea; they seem fascinated by the concept. It was not a great idea; it was just an aggregation of already know hacks with some enhancement based on an emerging communication technology called Blog. The more I read on reactions the more I find that people love the idea of wedding between new and old technologies. They love the paradox created by the situation. They seem to be seduced by the idea; as I am.

Finally I asked to some of these bloggers their fascination, in the present world of technologies, for Moleskines: a technology used by humans for ages. This article is the result of their work; their passion for Moleskines’ notebooks. I got their answer and texts one after the other. I I’m astonished by the result, the work they done. They are all great pieces of work. They are more than inspiring.

I need to thank you all for your great work. This post is not my work, it is yours! I’m really happy to have done this project with you. Thank.

To all of you readers: continue your reading and you’ll be rewarded!

— PS: I didn’t know how to present them; in which order to place texts; so I sorted them in family names alphabetical order

By Merlin Mann

We all make decisions about the extravagances that we’ll permit ourselves, and one of mine is picking up a fresh Moleskine every month or two. Moleskines don’t record your thoughts any more efficiently than a $.99 notebook would, but they have a satisfying weight to them, and writing on a Moleskine’s silky pages just feels a little bit fancy to me.

You could probably make a case that food served on paper plates tastes the same as it would on fine bone china, but that’s an awfully cynical point, and it certainly won’t win you many second dates. A sexy little notebook makes you feel good and–who knows?–you might find yourself taking an extra few seconds to think about what you’re committing to those lovely pages, to pause a moment and reflect.

With so many disposable, marginally useful items crowding our lives, it’s comforting to have a well-made book in which to set down your thoughts.

By L.S. Russell

English, the language not the country, was invented over sixty-five million years ago by a man, living in the Neander Valley, named Manfried Piltdown. He named his new invention after his best friend, Brian English, who had a bad habit of ending his sentences in prepositions. The two were inseparable best friends and spent many years together hanging out in Brian’s garage (which was really his parents garage but they let him use it as long as he promised not to set fire to the glass where his grandmother kept her teeth), inventing languages and watching porn. Brian would do all the talking and Manfried would scribble the words that came out of Brian’s mouth in a notebook.

All was well until Satan invented junior high school, and other institutes of higher learning like the adult book store. Satan decided that he needed to teach three things so he hired some smokin’ hot teachers then he invented math, and driver’s education. But he was fucked if he could think of a third thing-so he went to see Manfied and Brian.

The following is an actual transcript:

SATAN: Dudes! I just invented junior high school.

BRIAN: Wicked Satan! Do you have a class president yet?

SATAN: No dude. I need to teach three things; I’ve got math and driver’s ed covered but I’m fucked if I can think of a third thing.

MANFRIED: Dude! I’ve got just the thing. It’s called English. Me and Brian invented it-it’s sweet.

SATAN: Psycotic dude! I have a couple of smokin’ hot babes who can teach it. How much do you want for it? I got like five bucks on me.

Transcript ends.

So Brian and Manfried went into another room to talk about selling English to Satan so he could teach it in junior high school. Brian was totally against it, but Manfried was psyched. They argued until they smelled smoke coming from the other room. When they went in, Satan was nowhere to be found, but Brian’s gran’s teeth were in flames in the middle of the room. Brian’s mom and dad kicked him out of their house, and Brian and Manfried were never friends again. Brian went to live in Finland, and Manfried sold English to Satan.

Brian tried to re-invent his own version of English, called English Leather, but since Manfried had the notebook (and the name English Leather sounded gay) it was no use.

So you see, I use Moleskine notebooks because of the storied history of the English language-a great language deserves to be written in a great notebook.

By Mike Shea

First draft of the story… In a Moleskine!

Citizen Fred’s Book

Citizen Fredrick Joseph Abergale stared at the object sticking out of the dirt hill. He had worked on this trail for six hours now and it was the first man made object he had seen. When he awoke to the soothing voice of Citizen G giving him the job of inspecting and clearing the trails of Great Falls for that day, his heart sank. The trails were twenty kilometers away from the huge towers of the city and offered little distraction from the sharp cool air, the

frighteningly wide sky, and the sickly green foliage creeping all around him.

Static filled his earbud. He only caught bursts of the microshows and had no idea if he was supposed to laugh or mourn. Rarely did he hear the fanfare at the beginning or end of the forty five second microdrama or microcomedy so all queues for feeling were gone.

The silence covered Fred like a cloak. It squeezed him and dropped moments of quiet in the normal bustle of his mind. In twenty minutes he would return to the road where a gyrocoptor would take him to the supershuttle and back to his home on the two thousand forty sixth floor of dwelling tower 23.

Then he saw the object half buried in the hill. Only the corner of the rectangular object shined from under the dirt. A shining plastic covered the corner of the black rectangle. It frightened Fred to look at it. It was alien to him. He kicked at it with one dirt-covered work boot. More dirt fell and the object slid down the hill. With one gloved hand he reached out and pulled it free. The black rectangle was sealed in some sort of plastic bag with a complex

fastener at the top far different from the atomic fasteners Fred was used to.

Fred pulled at the seal and it popped open with a puff of stale dust. He pulled farther and the plastic cover burst open and fell of the black rectangle inside. He recognized it at once, though he had never seen one in his life.

It was a book.

Fred’s heart lept and fell all at once. He had never been so scared or excited. He had never seen a book before, though he had once seen a picture in one of the historical data archives. He didn’t know what it was and Citizen G would not tell him, but an ancient man Fredonce cared for in a Medicare center spoke of these books. Fred thought the man was senile. Now however, he held one himself.

Don’t Be Evil.

The words, the only law of the planet now, hammered in Fred’s head. What would not be evil? Should he destroy the book? Should he bury it? Should he take it with him and tell Citizen G of it on the gyrocoptor? That feeling of excitement filled Fred again. His fingers ran over the black oilcloth cover. An elastic band held the book closed. When he touched it, the elastic snapped like brittle rubber. It fell away in three small black pieces and all thoughts of turning the book in fell away along with them.

Fred opened the book.

Most of the characters of the first page were difficult to make out. Fred’s eyes, used to only reading the ideal font decided upon by Citizen G, had to trace over each character before recognizing it. One word and one four-digit number, once recognized, sent waves of electricity through Fred’s cold body.

“January 2005”

Truth dawned on Fred like hot sunlight. The small book he held was nearly five hundred years old. His hands trembled. What words filled these ivory pages? No one knew what life was like so long ago. Few cared. Now Fred would read the words of another person like himself from centuries ago. He would hear the voice and read the mind of someone dead for at least four hundred years. His last hesitation broke and he turned to the next page.

Fred struggled with the first few pages before subconsciously recognizing the strange handwritten letters and words. Soon, with script and language problems falling away with each word, Fred fell into the stories themselves.

When he looked up two hours later, Fred saw the last rays of sunlight reflecting off of the two-mile high datacenters to the south. He looked up at the criss-crossing white trails of the supertransports in the sky above him. For his forty years, Fred looked at these trails but only now did he really see them. They looked like a web.

He felt the words of the book seeping into his thoughts. He felt his previous ideas and beliefs crumble and fall. Like a rogue program tearing through a central processing unit, the stories of that book burnt all new paths and circuits in Fred’s brain.

Fred didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know that in eight months he would plant a home-made bomb that would send one of the Citizen G datatowers crashing into twelve others. He didn’t know that he would stand on this hill a decade later, lean and starving but never so alive. He didn’t know that his grandchildren, naked and brown and wielding flint-headed spears, would hunt down wild deer for food.

Fred walked silently to the waiting gyrocoptor, tucking the small black book into the deep pocket of his blue overalls. His mind was empty and his thoughts were clear. And he was not afraid.

By Todd Storch

Moleskine…why do I love you so?

You aren’t “high tech”.

You aren’t powered by a lithium battery.

You don’t have Bluetooth or WiFi built in.

You don’t automatically sync with my PC.

I can’t get email updates from you when items are completed or added.

I can’t access you via the web when you aren’t around.

You don’t sound any alarms when something becomes due.

I can’t beam any info to you via infrared.

I can’t attach you to a portable keyboard.

You don’t have fingerprint security options.

What is is about you Moleskine? I think I have some ideas why I love you…

You have a cool, elastic band to keep you closed.

You demand a good pen to write on you.

You challenge me to determine what sections should be in you.

You love it when I give each page its own page number.

You love that I talk about you on other’s blogs.

Other people ask me about you all the time.

I don’t have to worry about charging you each night.

I feel productive writing on your pages.

I put down more thoughts and ideas on your pages than I did in my PDA.

You love it when I cross reference my To Do list items to other pages with additional details

You love the 2 different colored tabs I use for “Work” and “Personal” sections.

Your back pocket is perfect for pictures of my kids.

You secretly remind me of my favorite Mead “Trapper Keeper” when I was

11 years old.

You are “Old School” hip.

Some reasons why passion is infectious

I discovered this blog some days ago: Passionate- Create passionate users. They got the point. More important, they transmit it to you without efforts. So I finished reading one of their past posts entitled: Passion is Infectious. What a beautiful peace of work. It’s funny to see how thousands of years of survival in a wild world can be used in your daily life. If I remember right some books that I read and courses that I attend, years ago, on psychology and brain, we, humans, mimic for some natural reasons. First, because it take less energy (remember, basically humans are passive creatures, we are, unconsciously, trying to do the minimum to preserve our vital energy; another inheritance of our old days.). The second factor is a social psychology one: to be like our peers. Why do we need to be like our peers? Like it or not, it’s to have social acceptance. As socials creatures, it’s more than important to be accepted by our fellows. Even the hard cores anti-socials need companionship; but they will never say it.

As describe in Passion is Infectious, you can and you should take this fact in consideration to upgrade your average daily moods. It’s a little hack that you can, somewhat, easily do.

One of the best examples of passionate that transmit easily their passion is the Moleskine community. They are passionate and, unconsciously, we, their readers, tend to mimic them. This result in a seed of passion in us for Moleskines. Is there a better marketing tool then evangelization(consciously or not) of your product by passionate users? I don’t think so.

Analog Blog
Organize your Moleskine notebook as a blogThis January I was introduced to Moleskine notebooks. It seems that there is a little frenzy, on the blogsphere, on the subject, these days. I was recently searching for a good, beautiful and classic looking notebook for my next trip. I found it in the Moleskines.

When I found a discussion on it on the blogsphere I followed references and discussions. There is literally a small and beautiful community of bloggers that are passionate by them. They transmitted me this passion for Moleskines. You can find many posts on Moleskine hacks to optimize it’s usage [1][2][3][4][5].

Personally I was interesting to try to use some of these ideas, enhancing them, and use my Moleskines as an analog blog. Okay, it can seem crazy, it can seem really, really geek (and it is) but I’m curious to found if it can be effective and practical.

We first need to remember the main blog’s characteristics:

• A blog is a sort of electronic personal journal that you use to put thoughts in and get comments by the community. (Have in mind that this post is about analog blogs. Then this is a paper personal journal and you’ll not get comments from the community).
• A comment system is implemented for each post. (In our case, it will be your own comments on past posts. The concept will be strengthened if you suffer of multiple-personality).
• The posts on the blog are usually classified in categories.
• Blogs sometimes refer to external resources.
• Blogs usually reference internal thoughts.

Is that not beautiful? Okay, there is how you can see it on paper:

Figure 1

[Date : Location]

• This is where you enter the date of your post’s entry. This is probably one of the most important feature. You’ll be happy to have it in 20 years. With it, you’ll be able to track the evolution of your thoughts. After you can optionally add the location where you write the post. It’s a way to help you remember the circumstances of your writing. The mind work this way; with a simple smell, image or word you can remember a whole situation.

[Title]

• I personally think that the title is really important. It can help you to know, in a single phrase, what the post is about. It helps a lot while skimming the pages of your analog blog.

[Meta Data]

• This is a good idea of Merlin Mann. You can put some words that act like the title, help you rapidly remember the object of your post.

[Comments Pages References]

• This is the place where you put the page numbers of the comments you done on the post. I’ll come back to this feature later.

[Category]

• This is the category name to which your posts belong to.

[x : y]

• This is the permalink of your post. You’ll use these numbers to refer to this post. X is the number of the book where the post is present. Y is the current page of this book.

*Note: In the whole post I take in count that you are a Moleskine freak. So every reference has 2 numbers, one for the book and the other for the page. So if you have only one and don’t think about buying another one then you can erase the book number reference.

[v : w]

• This is an optional reference. It refers to where the post continues if he is made on more than one page.

[a : b]->

• This is a link on an external reference. Basically an external reference is a reference that is not in your analog blog. I’ll come back later on external references. A is the number of the book where the external references link page is and B is the page of the book where the external reference is viewable.

->[c : d]

• This is a link on an internal reference. An internal reference is another blog entry in your analog blog. It can be in the current book or another one. C is the number of the book where the internal references page is and D is the page of the book where the post is viewable.

Figure 2

The categories page is essential and is the second main feature after the posts’ pages. You can see it as a dynamic index. You can create your categories when you start your analog blog; but you also can create them when you need it. When you’ll create a new post that enters in one of these categories, you’ll dynamically add it on this page. This page will be the first or one of the first of your book. Remember, this is a sort of index or table of content.

[CategoryX]

• This is the name of a category. This is the same name that will be writing in the [category] section of the Figure 1.

[1 ; 2-4 ; 8 ; 12]

• This is the pages of the current book where you have posts that belong to this category.

Figure 3

This is the page where you’ll enter your comments on your posts. For this special page, I suggest you to begin at the next to last page. When the next to last page is full, continue to enter you comments on the previous one. Why working in reverse order? You think that all will be upside-down? You are right, it will be. But you will always be sure that you’ll not lack space for comments as long as your Moleskine is not full. There are two problems that will rise if you say, when you’ll start your analog blog, that you’ll take the last 20 pages for you comments. First, it’s possible that your posts entries reach the start of your comments and that you have only use 10 pages of your 20 dedicated ones to comment. You can also use the 20 comment pages and you don’t have any place left to continue adding comments. It’s why I suggest proceeding like this.

[e : f]

• This is the back reference to the post you comment. E is the number of the book where the commented post is situated and F is the page of this book where the comment is viewable.

Figure 4

The external reference page will be you last one (or last few ones). This is the place where you’ll put the external references referred by posts in the book. These external references can be an internet URL, an address, a phone number, etc. The purpose of this section is to put references that you don’t want to rewrite every time you refer to them in the analog blog’s current book.

[g : h]

• This is the reference number. G is the number of the current book. H is the page where the external reference is viewable. As you can see, you can use this reference in another book.

Finally you have your own analog blog ready. Now I just hope that this whole thing is effective and usable. Only the time will tell me it. I’ll probably not see the benefit of it in the first days, but month after month after month I hope that I’ll see them.

Okay, okay, I’ll do the security review of the analog blog system. It’s 100% safe over the internet as long as your Moleskine is not open and in the view of a broadcasting web camera. And it’s physically secure as long as he is on me and that I’m not assaulted with a .45.

So, this is a little post that I wanted to write. Share your thoughts, comments and additions by commenting it. I’m sure that the “system” is not perfect and it’s why I hope you’ll comment it.

---

[Update: 21 April 2005] I published a lightweight version of the system for Moleskine Pocket Daily Diary (or notebook)

[Update: 29 January 2005] I published a reaction and clarification post on the subject of analog blogs.

On Writing – Bird By Bird


Some quotes wrote by Anne Lamott that I write to remember

Sorry for those that read this blog for the security stuff. The thing is that sometime I want to write, and share these writings, on other subjects than security. The more I write the more I have things to write about. Ideas come up in my minds and only disappear when I wrote them, otherwise they say: “I’ll not go out of your brain until you write me down! Otherwise you’ll lose me forever!” As you know, I started to write for myself with this blog. At first it was an experience. More and more it become a part of me; I become more and more with the writer’s thinking. Hahaha not a professional, but a tinny neophyte. I don’t aspect to be a professional writer (hope for you); I just aspect to continue to write for myself.

I just finished reading a beautiful book called Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. It’s a book that anybody who write for fun or profit need to read and reread. It’s a true and inspirational work on writing and writers. It initiates you in world of writing and publishing. I really appreciated the work and I need to write quotes from the book to be able to remember them time to time.

It can seem that I ripped the whole book but I hadn’t the patience to do it. I suggest you to buy it at your local bookstore or if there is none, on Amazon. It’s a 15$ well spent.

“Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won’t do any of those things; you’ll never get in that way.”

“E.L. Doctorow once said that “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trop that way.” You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, life, I have ever heard.

So after I’ve completely exhausted myself thinking about the people I most resent in the world, and my more arresting financial problems, and, or course, the orthodontia, I remember to pick up the one-inch picture frame and to figure out a one-inch piece of my story to tell, one small scene, one memory, one exchange. I also remember a story that I know I’ve told elsewhere but that over and over helps me to get a grip: thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on bird written that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”

“Writing can be a pretty desperate endeavor, because it is about some of our deepest needs: our need to be visible, to be heard, our need to make sense of our lives, to wake up and grow and belong.”

“Then I do the menial work of getting it down on paper, because I’m the designated typist, and I’m also the person whose job it is to hold the lantern while the kid does the digging. What is the kid digging for? The stuff. Details and clues and images, invention, fresh ideas, an intuitive understanding of people. I tell you, the holder of the lantern doesn’t even know what the kid is digging for half the time – but she knows gold when she sees it.”

“You need to trust that you’ve go it in you to listen to people, watch them and notice what they wear and how they move, to capture a sense of how they speak. You want to avoid at all costs drawing your characters on those that already exist in other works of fiction. You must learn about people, not from what you read. Your reading should confirm what you’ve observed in the world.”

“Writing is about learning to pay attention and to communicate what is going on.”

“The Gulf Stream will flow through a straw provided the straw is aligned to the Gulf Stream, and not at cross purposes with it. […] that what it means fo us, for writers, is that we need to align ourselves with the river of the story, the river of the unconscious, of memory and sensibility, of our characters’ lives, which can then pour through us, the straw.”

“We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must. Otherwise, you’ll just be rearranging furniture in rooms you’ve already been in. Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words – not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues. […] Write as if your parents are dead.”

“Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.”

“But they are always yours, your books as well as your children. You helped bring your work in progress teach you to give. They teach you to get out of yourself and become a person for someone else. This is probably the secret to happiness. So that’s one reason to write. Your child and your work hold you hostage, suck you dry, ruin your sleep, mess with your head, treat you like dirt, and then you discover they’ve given you that gold nugget you were looking for all along.”

“Becoming a writer can also profoundly change your life as a reader. One reads with a deeper appreciation and concentration, knowing now how hard writing is, especially how hard it is to make it look effortless. You begin to read with a writer’s eyes. You focus in a new way. You study how someone portrays his or her version of things in a way that is new and bold and original. You notice how a writer paints in a mesmerizing character or era for you, without your having the sense of being given a whole lot of information, and when you realize how artfully this has happened, you may actually put the book down for a moment and savor it, just taste it.”

On Writing


A letter to myself… Ramblings on knowledge, ideas and writing

My first reader is myself. Why am I writing? For myself, to help me manage my knowledge; help me to structure my thoughts; help me to get a trace of what I thought at a specific time in my life. Why now and not before even later? I really don’t know. I just start to find the benefit of writing. How I found it? By writing; as a child I wasn’t literate oriented; I was playing in the woods, hunting everything that moved. Eventually I worked in a library. I was young; I hadn’t really read books by myself before. I checked them, I manipulated them and I fall in love with them. Since then, I was ordering hundreds of books at my local library and at Amazon; books on any type of subjects. Since then, hundreds, thousands of worlds opened to me at once. I was privileged to be in touch with other human beings’ ideas. If someone writes a thing, it’s because there is an idea behind it. Ideas are the fuel of Knowledge. Reading something is trying to get the fuel to understand the knowledge generated by it combustion. The possibilities are awesome. You can get the knowledge you just learn, get it as is; interpolate from it; extrapolate from it; infer with it; put it in relation with other bit of knowledge you have; then find new knowledge or meanings. Everything can be knowledge; knowledge is everywhere just waiting to be understood. Writing is a way to understand it, to communicate it and to archive it.

People that had read my about section know that I started to write this blog to increase my English skills. Why do I write on security? Because it’s a field of interest and that I have things to write about. Sometime I can be right; sometime I can be wrong. In both cases the aims are the same: learning, understanding and sharing.

Do I have readers other then me? Probably some. Do people syndicate my blog? I don’t have idea. Do people like what I write? Some possibly, other no. Do I care? I’m not too sure. I first write for myself. I share on the web what I write in the case that one person can find one of my thought useful to himself. If I upgrade my English skills by writing this blog, if I learn from my search and from others’ comments and if I succeed in being understood then my goals are fully reached.

I bought the Oxford’s essential Guide to Writing this Christmas. I just started to read it in parallel with The Da Vinci Code (Yeah I know, I’m a little slow on this one) and I found it a really interesting writing. Thomas S. Kane gets to the point and had written some really interesting things that everyone loves been remembered:

… And so people say, “I can’t think of anything to write about.”

That’s strange, because life is fascinating. The solution is to open yourself to experience. To look around. To describe what you see and hear. To read. Reading takes you into other minds and enriches your own. A systematic way of enriching your ideas and experiences is to keep a commonplace book and journal.

I’ll also rewrite his introduction that is really inspirational:

Two broad assumptions underlie this book: (1) that writing is a rational activity, and (2) that it is a valuable activity.

To say that writing is rational means nothing more than that it is an exercise of mind requiring the mastery of techniques anyone can learn. Obviously, there are limits: one cannot learn to write like Shakespeare or Charles Dickens. You can’t become a genius by reading book.

But you don’t have to be a genius to write clear, effective English. You just have to understand what writing involves and to know how to handle words and sentences and paragraphs. That you can learn. If you do, you can communicate what you want to communicate in words other people can understand. This book will help by showing you what good writers do.

The second assumption is that writing is worth learning. It is of immediate practical benefit in almost any job or career. Certainly there are many jobs in which you can get along without being able to write clearly. If you know how to write, however, you will get along faster and farther.

There is another, more profound value to writing. We create ourselves by words. Before we are businesspeople or lawyers or engineers or teachers, we are human beings. Or growth as human beings on our capacity to understand and to use language. Writing is a way of growing. No one would argue that being able to write will make you morally better. But it will make you more complex and more interesting—In a word, more human.

Is there anything that I can say after these words? Only one thing, Have a happy new year!