Editing The Pen Addict 25/transcript (section)

== Mechanical Pencils ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yep. And then, you know, I reviewed a pen a couple weeks ago called the Pentel Sleechy Teco Mini Gel Ink Pen. It's a mini, mini Sleechy. And it's got a nice aluminum barrel. And when I ordered it originally, they only had one color, and it was a copper barrel. And I'm not particularly fond of that color, but it was too cool of a pen to pass up. I wanted to get it and review it. Well, they got some new barrel colors in, and I'm going to get this cool-looking orange one for my personal use. It's going to be a good everyday carry type of pen. It'll go good in my dome utility journals, like when I'm carrying it around in my pocket and things like that. Because it comes with a .3 millimeter Sleechy black ink cartridge. And that's one of my favorite ink cartridges in writing, nibs, styles. So it's a really good pen.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And one of the other things I want to get is a mechanical pencil, which, you know, I don't use a lot. But I appreciate this one pencil called the Pilot Delphold Double Knock Mechanical Pencil. It's a relatively inexpensive pencil. You know, it doesn't have anything great like the Kurutoga, you know, auto-led rotation mechanism. Or, you know, it doesn't have that engineering style like the Rotring 600. But it's got this really cool – the whole, I guess, nib unit ejects from the – it's protected in the barrel, right? So you eject out the whole writing, the whole business end of the pen, the pencil. And then you can click out the lead. So it's a double knock. So you click it once to get the tip out and then click it again to forward the lead. And it's just kind of a – it's a neat design. It's really well done. And I've used one in the past and they got some – they have some new barrel colors that are translucent. So those looked interesting to me. So, you know, I've been going through filling up my cart with a few things. I just haven't hit the checkout button yet. And it's killing me like you wouldn't believe.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Sometimes listening to the things you want to buy is as useful as the things you have bought.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, the sad part is I think about it a lot. Yeah. You know, it's like – you know, I try not – as much as it sounds like it, I try not to buy on a whim. You know, even if I'm going to buy something just to review, I want a reason to do it. You know, is this something different than I've used before? Or, you know, would this be something, you know, readers would be interested in? Is this going to be something I'm going to use personally for a longer period of time than just a pen review? Those type of things. So I actually do consider a lot of those things. And sometimes that makes it hard to pull the triggers. Like, you know, I don't want to be frivolous, you know, even though I'm fortunate enough to, you know, have my blog sponsored by JetPen. So I do have some freedom and some things that I can order. You know, I still take it – I still put some thought into it instead of just shotgunning the approach.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I feel like because you've mentioned the sponsorship, I think it might be important for me to note that, I mean, most of the – like 95% of the show notes, they go to JetPens. They do not ask for that. They do not pay for that. We get nothing for that. The network gets nothing for that from that perspective. Just in my opinion, they're the best place that I've found online to buy this stuff for great prices, good service, and they have the catalog.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, that's it. That's exactly it. They have the most products available that suit my needs. Yeah. So, I mean, it's – yeah, I mean, that's definitely why, you know, at least I use them the most, obviously, just because – I mean, that's where I first started getting into some of the pens that I'm into because no one else carried them, honestly. I mean, and now there are other companies that do carry it, but the depth of the catalog, it's hard to shop somewhere else unless I'm looking for something very, very specific.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Plus, they have crazy Japanese stuff.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's right. Which is just awesome. Yep, that's what got me going, all those fine-tipped Japanese pens, and then just kind of branched out from there.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I'm going to put a link in the show notes to a section on JetPens called Asian Office. If you've never been to it – I never bought anything from there, but they're the most – the craziest things you will ever see, like elephant-shaped Post-it notes and stuff like that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Oh, yeah. There's some fun stuff in there. I actually don't have a lot of those items, but they're really cool. I love the animal-shaped paperclips. That's some of my favorite things just because it's not like cat and dog. It's like 35 different shapes or something like that. It was like, man, anything they can think of to make a paperclip form, they've done it.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Here we go. Here's some of them. Penguin, elephant, pig, bird, squirrel, paper airplanes, aquarium series, which includes alligators, butterflies. Strawberries, many, many more. Hippos. So, yeah, there's lots of stuff. I mean, it's a really random place. I should buy some stuff from there, actually, I think. Really good Christmas gifts. I stock in stuffers, I think. Yeah, exactly. A lot of that sort of stuff on there. So, we're going to talk a bit about penmanship, which is a really nice word, I think, penmanship. It is. It's got some nice connotations to it. But before we do that, I think it would be the right time to talk about our first sponsor. Now, we spoke about DocuSign last week. Now, they've come back to sponsor us again. Now, obviously, we love pens and paper here, right? That's what we love.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Absolutely.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But probably what we don't love is paper in abundance, legal documents. Who loves them? I mean, yes, you get to pull out the nice pen and put pen to paper and make that signature. But, you know, then you've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages. And I'm talking specifically, Brad, about all the documents you've probably been signing as we spoke about VR House Move.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yes, yes, very much.

'''Myke Hurley:''' And, you know, as nice as all that stuff is, nobody really likes that aggravation. So, it would be so much easier if this could all be done online. And this is what DocuSign provide. They give you the ability to send and receive digital documents which you're able to sign online. And it would be legally binding. So, you can upload documents from your hard drive or from cloud services like Dropbox, for example. And then, you know, if you are the sender, you can go in and annotate all of the areas that you need to be signed initial to have your address stamped. And then you can send it out by email to the people that you need to sign it. If you are one of the receivers of the document, you will receive an email which takes you to a web page where you are shown through. So, you're entered into the DocuSign system. And it talks you through and walks you through step by step all of the elements that you need to enter. So, you need to put your initial here. You need to type your name here. And you need to sign here. And you can sign in a bunch of ways. You can sign on the trackpad. If you're in, you can open one of the iOS or Android devices and sign right on the screen with your finger, which is awesome. You can sign with your mouse. Obviously, that's not, you know, as precise as doing it with your finger. And then once you've signed, if you are, if you sign up for DocuSign or you're already a DocuSign user, that signature gets saved. So, in the future, you can just drag it straight into the document. The iPhone, iPad, and Android apps that they have allow you to access, sign, and send your documents on the go. So, if you already have documents in DocuSign, you need to send them out to somebody else. You want to get a copy of it. You want to, you know, you can get, you can access them all online, which is excellent. You can also print the documents as well once they're done, if you like. And then as the person who sends, you get everything sent back to you. Once everyone's signed it, the document is all sent around totally securely, all encrypted, and everything you sign is legally binding. People literally sign to complete their home purchases in DocuSign, and it is legally binding. You can help support 70 decibels and start your no-limit 30-day free trial at docusign.com. That's D-O-C-U-S-I-G-N dot com forward slash 70 decibels, 7-0-D-E-C-I-B-E-L-S. If you have documents, contracts, and stuff that you need signed, DocuSign is the way to go. I want to thank them for sponsoring this week's episode of the Pen Addict Podcast. Tell me about penmanship then.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, so I put out a call on Twitter last night just looking for some show topic ideas, see if anything, any topics came up that I thought were interesting. And one came up almost immediately when I sent it out. A gentleman named Alan sent me a tweet, said, how about talking about how to improve your handwriting and penmanship? And that struck a chord immediately because ever since I've started, you know, penaddict.com, that's one of the things I always get asked about is, you know, how did you get your handwriting that way? Your handwriting is so neat. Oh, your handwriting is amazing. And all these – I've gotten comments on my handwriting since day one. So I figured it would be kind of, you know, fun, I guess, to kind of talk about how that happened and why it is the way it is and how bad it is now compared to about a decade ago when it used to be, you know, really, really good. So, yeah, I thought that was a very interesting topic because I do get asked that a lot.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' There's really no – for me, it really started kind of with the whole pen addiction and my penmanship is probably goes hand in hand because, you know, we've talked about, you know, probably in episode one, you know, how I got started, you know, using the pens, types of pens that I use and everything like that. And I can remember vividly in, you know, elementary school and middle school trying to find the finest tip pens I could have because I like to write really small. And, you know, of course, I'm not – don't really care that much about my penmanship, you know, when I'm in fifth grade or something like that. And, you know, you're forced to use cursive writing and other things. But, you know, I always still kind of printed my letters and things like that and wrote really small. So I always had – from day one, I've always had just kind of a decent baseline of my penmanship was never horrible, you know, coming up through school. You know, that's kind of something you can't get around because you don't know at the time, you know, how your writing is going to turn out right. Some people have horrible penmanship in school. Some have it really nice. Some have big flowing cursive. Some have nice print. And some of it's chicken scratch that you can't even read. But I'm of the belief that you can correct it if you think you have, you know, poor penmanship just because, you know, I had it – like I said, I had a good baseline of decent handwriting, right? And then as odd as it may sound, I went into two jobs after college that completely changed and fortified my handwriting style. The first job – and this is an item that not many people know. It's one of those – you know, if you ever fill out those – ever see those things on the blog that go around blogs, you know, tell me, you know, five things, you know, I don't know about you. Or whatever, you know, things like that. I was a golf professional for about four years when I got out of college. Hang on a moment. Assistant golf pro at a country club, right? Teaching golf and, you know, doing all that stuff.