Vanishing Point

Braving the rain and the Kennedy funeral, I took a trip into Boston today to visit the Bromfield Pen Shop. There I procured a Pilot Vanishing Point retractable fountain pen, in carbonesque black.

It's a wonderful and quirky pen, looking more or less like a retractable ballpoint unless you look closely. The pointy end actually sits at the top when it's clipped in your pocket. This is confusing at first -- you're continually clicking the wrong end with your thumb. The other potential downside is that you hold the pen at the clip end. This doesn't bother me at all. In fact, it's helpful because it keeps the nib correctly oriented.

I bought the pen with a Fine nib (the only one in the shop, it turned out), which writes about as fine as my XF Lamy nib, but much, much more smoothly.

The only downside so far seems to be the ink converter which holds only a smidgen of ink at a time. I'm currently using Noodler's Black, my favorite ink mostly because it's one of the few truly permanent fountain pen inks on the market.

Jim on 08.29.09 @ 04:57 PM ET [link]

Git Going

We use both svn and Perforce for version control at work, but when I needed version control on my home network I turned to git. 'git' is the brainchild of Linux founder Linus Torvalds. It superficially resembles svn, but the underlying model is quite different.

For my lightweight home use any of these version control systems would be fine, but I chose 'git' simply because it's new-ish and because I haven't used it before.

My personal preference is actually Perforce, which has awesome line-by-line merging. Perforce does cost actual dollars, though I think there's a small non-commercial installation available. But it's really much too big a tool to manage the hundred or so scripts and web pages that I want to maintain.

Jim on 08.16.09 @ 02:24 PM ET [link]

Katamari Wedding

(via Boing Boing) Here's a set of photos from a wonderfully silly Katamari Damacy Wedding, complete with the soundtrack from the game.

Katamari Damacy is a great Japanese video game for the PS2. It's a little hard to describe, other than to say that it's completely unlike any other video game you've ever played.

Coincidentally, I just shot this photo of one of my daughters wearing similar footwear.

Jim on 08.08.09 @ 08:40 PM ET [link]