Editing The Pen Addict 308/transcript (section)

== Cross Tracker ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Or should I say, boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. Because that's what was happening right before the show, as my cross-tracker pen was going off that we were going to talk about in this episode. Yeah, what is this? I figure since you're so far away from me, I figured I was getting alert that we were separated. Like, you have a tracker implanted in your body, and I have you installed on my app here on the phone.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Wait a second. How did you do that? Is that what you do when I'm sleeping in Atlanta? Oh, no. He got me.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I think I've said too much. I think I've said too much now. So that's what that alert was. You were going off, Myke. You were too far away. It's when you went to get your water. It tracks you when you're at your podcast desk, and then when you went to go get your water, it beat me saying, oh, you have lost your connectivity with Michael Hurley.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You know, I actually think that, funnily enough that you mentioned that, I have a pending request in my five of my friends from you, I think. Oh, really? Yeah. I don't know how that happened.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So let's talk about that. That's one of my least favorite apps ever. Okay. But I know Ana likes to use it, and I was using it when Tiff, I had to pick her up at the airport because the domestic terminal is so big. So I figured, well, I'll just go ahead and throw Myke in there too since I'm here at the airport, and I can figure out where he's at.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Now you have my location forever because I just shared with you indefinitely. I can see exactly where you are right now, and you can do the same for me.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Wonderful. So who needs the tracker? But this pin needs the tracker, Myke. My cross tracker pin. Did you see this thing?

'''Myke Hurley:''' We spoke about this a long time ago, I feel like. And I don't know exactly why. Maybe it was just announced or something like that. But we spent time talking about this before.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. It seems like about a year ago, I'm pretty sure it was just maybe the fountain pen because I don't remember. Because I remember them being like crazy expensive, like $200, $300, and to have the fountain pen with the little tracking mechanism in it. And that just seemed like egregious to me as like, I don't need that. Who needs that? I don't know if this ballpoint pen came out at the same time, but this is a much more reasonable ask from something that hardly anyone needs. Right? Who needs a pen with a tracking device in it in case you leave it behind? But I guess there's a certain group of people that do. Especially with cross, they're in this market of, hey, gift and gadgety type products, right? Right. So cross is known. Like this is probably a pen you buy for someone else you think you're being funny. It's like, hey, this is the way to stop losing your pen, right? So it surprised me in how nice it's built, how good it feels, how well it writes, and that the technology actually works. Which is what you don't see often in a analog digital crossover product, right? Like when we talk about handwriting recognition, I know that's way more complex than location tracking. But those handwriting, you know, and transfer it to digital devices, those products tend to rarely work. But this is actually a product that works. So it's got this little Bluetooth mechanism in the cap of the pen. And you download this app on your phone, you set it up, it knows where your pen is. It knows if you leave, if you're not in like a Wi-Fi safe zone, like you can put in your safe zones, like at your house, so your pen's not going off all the time. Like if you walk about 20 feet away from your pen, it starts beeping. It starts beeping. And it's like a reminder, you get an alert on your phone. It's like, hey, you left your pen behind. And it was like, oh, that's kind of cool. And it really works.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I can totally see it being a frustration in certain instances, right? Like as soon as you said that, I imagined ye olde corporate Myke, right? That I would, you know, I'd be at my desk and I would go and use the bathroom or go to lunch or whatever. And my phone would be pinging me to tell me that I've left my pen behind. And it seems kind of strange because it's like, well, I don't always need to take my pen with me, right? Like that's kind of the funny part about it. But yeah, I get it. It's a fun idea. I can see how these two companies decided to work together, right? Like this is a benefit, like a positive for both of them, right? Because they get kind of a bit of cross-pollination amongst their customer base. And it is a serious novelty gift, right? Like it's not a joke gift, but it is kind of like if you gave this to someone, there's an inbuilt joke. You'd be making a commentary. Yeah, right? That like, oh, like either you're always saying people are stealing your pens or you're always losing your pen. And now that won't happen. And so it is a fun product. But I think one of the things that I've been concerned about, and it seems like that's not the case, is that the extra size and weight that the tracker requires would like ruin the writing experience. But I guess that's not the case.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's what I assumed was going to happen because it's a very wide pen. And you know how I feel about wide pens. You have to have a wide tip to write with. And this has a medium ballpoint tip. And that is fine. Like with this width of the barrel, as long as it has a wider tip, it's fine to write with. And it's lighter than I thought. This must be, it's a very, very lightweight. I'm guessing it's aluminum. I tried to look or it's either a very thin brass. It's not as heavy as I thought it would be. It's a little back-weighted at the top, but I've definitely felt worse. So this is, this was a surprise. That's why I wanted to talk about it because I just, you know, pooh-poohed the idea of its even existence, right? So I'm impressed and I kind of like it. And, you know, I'm not going to go run out and spend $95 on this pen, but it's a valid thing. And I am kind of impressed with what they did.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, it's made its way onto, I guess, the standard, I have a somebody in my life gift kind of idea, right? That you could be like, well, you know, you can also get this pen, which is kind of cool and it has something fun about it that somebody might enjoy, right? Like, you know, it's a cool thing to talk about when you're in the office, that kind of deal.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Exactly. And my friend Myke in the chat room reminds me, they also have other products. They do a pen case, Cross does a pen case with actually the tracker built in, you know, a little pocket, like which you could use tile for or anything else, throw that in a pen case, which I've done in my backpacks and things like that. Use the tile system. So that's cool. I like how this is one of those analog digital crossovers that works and I'm glad to see it. You know, it's not a for everyone thing and it's not something I'll get a lot of use out of actually the losing part because I tend not to leave my pens behind, but I just actually like the pen in general. So it's pretty cool. That's pretty sweet. It will not be making the trip to Houston.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Oh, yeah. So you're off to Houston this week?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' This week? Tomorrow. Yeah. I am. I've very much lost track of the days this week. Because it's been busy and when I'm going out of town that everything just gets shortened up. So I was in Atlanta Monday, home working all day yesterday, podcasting and packing today, then off to Houston tomorrow. So I'm going to be at Drumgools, the pen store in Houston. The big time pen store in Houston. Maybe the one and only pen store in Houston. I don't know. Houstonians can tell me more about that. But Drumgools is going to be the place to be this week. I'll be there Thursday afternoon and Saturday in the store. So Thursday afternoon, there's an event with Montegrappa CEO Giuseppe Aquila. I think I'm pronouncing that right. So he'll be there talking about Montegrappa pens. And I'll just be hanging out. And I'll probably sit down for an interview with him real quick. And then Saturday, I'll just be in store all day, just, you know, doing meet and greet, working at the shop, you know, glad handing, you know, kissing babies. Those things I do, Myke, you know.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Blessing people's pens, that kind of stuff.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, yeah. So that's, it's a fun trip, you know, not much businessy going on, but more of a fun trip for me going to Drumgools and hanging out with Larry and Christine and Michael, their son. I've gotten to know them throughout the year, you know, just as they've started to branch out into doing pen shows. So we've gotten to meet them and they wanted to arrange this. So it just worked out really, really well. Well, the timing was right for me to get down there for a couple days and hanging out. So I wanted to throw in what I'm packing for this trip and how I'm packing, what I'm carrying. And as we were leaning up to this, we already got a question in the chat room. Hey, how do you do this when you fly? So we get these questions a lot and all the time. So I wanted to just go through, since this is a short trip, this is just a carry on trip for me. Um, I'll rarely check anything unless I'm taking not to a show because then the luggage gets quite large when I'm carrying all the gear. So my carry on bag of choice is the Tom Ben Aeronaut. Of course, you've heard me talk about it a million times. It's the 45. It's the larger of the two bags. But even for me, and I say that meaning for someone my size who carries larger size clothes, um, you know, I'm not as dainty as you, Myke. I can't fit all my clothes in a Ziploc. I can fit five, six days of clothes in the Aeronaut easily, easily. So, yeah, for this three days, this short trip, the Aeronaut's the way to go for me, uh, for clothes, toiletries, all that type of stuff. Then, one of these days, Myke, I'm not going to carry my Bowgear Bullpup backpack anymore because it just gets me in trouble because everyone wants to know where they can buy it. They're out of business, but no one's made a better bag than I've tried yet. And, I need to try to find a replacement just so I have something good that still exists. Because one of these days, something's going to happen to this bag and I'm going to be SOL. So, it's the best bag for me ever made. Um, I just, I don't know. I like everything about it. And I, it's a special bag. It had a lot of special features made on it, of course, because I'm a special guy. And, uh, it was a special purchasing process for this. So, this bag is really, really cool. But you can look at it. It looks like, I would probably like one of the GORUCK bags if they weren't just all black. One of these days, if I find, like, a very colorful GORUCK, I might get that because that's probably the thing it's most similar to. So, I carry my MacBook Pro and that's the 13-inch. That's what I do all my work on. I have not embraced the iPad life, Myke. I can't do it for, like, blogging and writing and all that stuff. But, um, yeah, one of the questions I'm going to just sidetrack here on the backpack thing. The Tom Ben, since I'm a huge fan, I've only tried the Synapse 19, which is too small for me. They have a Synapse 25, which I don't really love the style of. But I think that would be kind of, like, the perfect fit for me for what I need to carry in a backpack. But it's hard to give up this bow gear. So, that's one I need to look at. So, in that backpack, along with my laptop, I'm bringing my A5 seed case. That's things in use every day. I'm not going to lie. We did a good job on our seed case, Myke. You did. You know, I'm proud of those cases, which, of course, mine carries my Hobonichi Cousin. It will carry my Pentate B, the titanium one I got from there. What was that Kickstarter anniversary project thing?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Do you remember that, like, last year? Yeah, like, it was some anniversary from, like, their... Yeah, they had, like, these special limited edition things from previous good characters. Characters? Yes. Not characters. What am I thinking? What's the word?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yes. Good people.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Companies? Whatever. It doesn't matter. Companies.