Cramped Writing
Don’t you hate writing in spiral-bound notebooks? Whenever you work on the left page, you just keep bouncing against the darn spiral about halfway through writing a line. Well, at least I do. Or used to do. The other day, my wife saw me writing and heard me mutter about “evil conspiracies”, “waste of paper” and other such things I’m wont to offer when I’m frustrated. So she just walked over and said: “Honey - why don’t you just fold it in half?”
I was dumbstruck. I never even thought of that before. It’s easy, it’s fairly obvious, I’m usually not exceedingly stupid, and yet I never realized this.
Much improved!
There are of course at least two things to learn here. One, my wife is really clever - and yet, she still puts up with me. Which does make me rather grateful. (Note to self: “Self, get some flowers!”)
Two: Sometimes it just pays either asking for advice or asking yourself “What else besides the intended purpose (writing) can I do with it, and can it solve my problem?”. Sometimes, the solution to a hard problem is just sitting there in plain sight, too obvious to be discovered by deep thoughts about the problem. (Not that I had too many deep thoughts about writing in spiral-bound notebooks…)
Ah yes, the spiral bound notebook hack. I didn’t realize that the binding was a problem since I’m used to folding my notebook in half due to the space restrictions on my desk. Another solution would be to buy notebooks that have the spiral binding across the top of the page.
Pat your wife on the back for me please. Very great thought. How about another few ideas to solve the problem.
(if the top binders didn’t work to really solve the problem)
When you get to the resverse side of the paper, turn the paper upside down. (makes reading a bit more hecktic)
At any rate, not to get too far of subject, but I am a left handed, right brained person, and I’ve been using PDA’s of some sort sense they barely had any features and I can tell you be happy that scroll bars are all on the right hand side of the PDA because you certainly can’t read what you are trying to if you hand is in the way. I’ve been begging for a left handed PDA option for a long time, if you know a solution I’d be happy to hear it and, well, that’s about it.
9P.S. I work for a big insurance company and support Microsoft products but I certainly don’t stick up for them unless they deserve it. This looks like an interesting blog I must say, so I wanted to drop by and say hi.)
Welcome to my blog, Jason! And thanks for the additional ideas - that certainly works too.
I was actually thinking of left handed people when I was writing in that journal - “What the heck do they have to go through!?”. Sorry I can’t offer a left-handed PDA solution - but I certainly hope the iPhone pays attention to this….
That’s simple and overwhelming, because you blogged it like you did. Yes, people have to do more blogs like that. Great, really!