Digital Notes: One pen to rule them all

James Kendrick (http://jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/2007/12/the-digital-not.html) posted a wonderful write-up today comparing his current digital note-taking system to his old pre- tablet system. Much of it reiterates the well-established advantages of digital notes, but it's stuff that needs to be restated and James did it in a way that is very relatable. In particular, I appreciate his reminder that the Tablet PC pen can perform the duties of a basket full of pens, markers, and highlighters. I use a variety of these tools at work and, I gotta tell you, swapping colors, cursors and styles with a tap of my tablet pen is so much easier. An edge he left out was the ability to cleanly erase mistakes. I am so spoiled by this that I must slow down when writing on paper to avoid filling it with scratch-outs. This paragraph alone had five scratch-outs, but you wouldn't have known it. As my recent hard drive woes (http://sumocat.blogspot.com/2007/11/halloween-hard-drive-failure.html) illustrated, data loss is a very real possibility with digital notes. However, I also showed that good backup practices make it possible to spring back with minimal data loss. In terms of absolute loss, I'm out three pages. Everything else was restored or recreated, and I'm working on a backup routine that's even stronger. Granted, digital note-taking is not a bulletproof system and I did resort to paper when my tablet was down, but using paper as a backup to my digital system is so preferable to using paper as my primary.

CateGoogles: Tablet_PC Mood = pleasant