Editing The Pen Addict 13/transcript (section)

== Mail Delivery ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's pretty much been vanishing point, but, you know, right before the podcast, the mail came and I have a box here that the tape is still, a box from jet pins that the tape is still sealed on. So I haven't even had time to open it yet. So next, maybe next week we'll go through some, uh, some new stuff that I, that I got.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I don't know how you show such self-restraint.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, I've, I've been sideways busy today is the only reason. Otherwise it would have been opened already. So that's, that's my only excuse.

'''Myke Hurley:''' We recorded. Yeah. We've recorded an episode since I got back. Yeah. So we've spoken about the field notes, not opened them yet, but I wanted to make sure that we'd spoken about them.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep. We talked about them last week. I hadn't cranked them open, but I did see, uh, Mr. Hackett's photo of his field notes and his, uh, zebra Saracic clip on Twitter this morning. Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' He's, uh, he cracked open the, the first of the national crop edition.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep. He had the corn in use. So those are, those are pretty cool looking. I passed on the national crop edition. I don't know why it was just, you know, wasn't it's beautiful. Just, you know, I, I have a problem with, with the field notes where I can't just buy one set of them. I buy two at a minimum and those were a bigger set and a set of six. So you just have too many. So I would have, and I've got an, I didn't need, I wasn't going to buy six. I was going to buy 12. I couldn't buy just, if I bought just six, I would never use them. That's just the way I am. It's, I don't, I don't collect things, but it's like that collector mentality, right? I'm going to buy it, but not use it. Well, I want to use my field notes. So I usually buy a minimum of two packs if I like them and crack one open, use it and stash the other one for later use. That's cool. And I didn't, I didn't want to buy two boxes of the, um,

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, because if you really like this version, double the amount of time that you can spend with the book. Because most of the time, but well, usually by the time you finished using that pack of field notes, they won't be for sale anymore.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. And plus I like to, I like to give some away to people. Like if they missed out on one and they say, Oh, I really wish I had such and such. I was like, well, you know what? I got an extra one. Let me send one to you. So I've done that to a few, for a few people.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You sent some to me?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Mm-hmm.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So, um, I think we should talk about our first sponsor for this week before we move on into our main topic. So, um, our sponsor again this week is Squarespace. They continue into sponsors throughout the month of May. So, uh, Squarespace, they are everything you need to create an amazing website or blog. Um, they have extremely reliable hosting. Um, hosting never goes down. Um, they have very, very powerful website creation tools. You can, you know, very simply, using their WYSIWYG editors, create a site that looks exactly as you want. You can base it from, um, their very professionally designed templates. So you can create something all on your own if you are a CSS wizard or wizardess. I'm a guy for witch. I don't like that CSS. It sounds weird. Um, if you want to create a site like 70 decibels and you want to have multiple people being able to log in, you can do that. You can set people up with multiple logins so you can have user accounts and you can set their permissions. Like if for, as I say, if for any reason I don't believe that Brad has good taste and I don't want him changing the colors of the website, I can restrict his editing abilities on that. Um, if you are a Markdown person, if you like to write in Markdown, you can write natively in Markdown in both on the web and in the post field or even in the iOS applications, which are also extremely cool and show you all of your stats and your referrers and everything. Now we spoke last week that Brad was moving over, um, to Squarespace and I believe he is still doing so. You accidentally moved over a couple of days ago because of some DNS issues and you weren't ready, were you, Brad?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' No, I wasn't ready to move and I had some time off and I had some DNS issues. So I was like, well, let me just go and make the move to Squarespace. And, you know, I, I got everything ready and started the move and I thought originally I had a DNS problem, but actually in the process of moving over to Squarespace, I hit a bug, um, on the Squarespace side of things. Um, the, you know, the best I can say is the Squarespace support has been nothing short of awesome. You know, I don't have my site in place right now. I've hit a bug. You know, I went through several, an email chain with support, you know, here's what I found. They're like, okay, here, let me look into it. And they were able to repeat, you know, through my steps, the same bug that we hit. So, you know, even though I don't have my site up and running, I was glad that they said, hey, yeah, we can, we can repeat this too. Let us escalate this. We're going to escalate this ticket. Um, and we'll, we'll get it looked at. So we're still going back and forth, um, you know, doing some testing. Um, so I haven't made my conversion over there yet, but even in the short time that I did have the site up, it, it, it's making it harder for me. I stay where I'm at right now because all the tools and toys are so cool over there. Everything's so much better at Squarespace than where I'm at now. Um, I'm dying to, like, the iOS apps are so slick. And I'm like, oh, this is awesome. And I can't use it. So, you know, I'm working with, uh, Squarespace support. They've been, um, extremely responsive and, you know, it, hopefully we'll get it resolved soon and I'll get the, the pen addict, uh, transferred over permanently.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So we were talking before the show and, and Brad was like, you know, should I, should I talk about it? Because, you know, I've, I've got a little bit of a problem. And I was like, well, no, because, you know, at the same time, you're telling me that the support's being excellent. And that's really important. You know, things can go perfectly for you, but they're going to go wrong at some point. I had a bug. I've had a couple of bugs and because I'm basically 70 decibel site is held together with good wishes and sellotape. The way that I put it together. Um, I have encountered a few issues and the support have always been really good. Like that. It doesn't feel like manufactured support. Like I feel like I'm talking to real humans and they're trying to deal with real human problems for me. So I figured that that really is as much of a feature as anything else that they offer, which is very fast, prompt, efficient, professional support. Um, and you know, we were talking as well. It doesn't matter how long it takes to get the bug fixed and whether it can, anything can be fixed, even a tool where you still want to be a part of Squarespace. That's right. That speaks to the tools as well. Right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's, that's exactly right. I mean, I, I've, I've seen the light and getting in there and playing with the tools and, and everything involved with the blog and the blog set up. I mean, the pen addict's been around for almost five years. I have a 1100 or so posts. I have over 20,000 comments. I could import that entire blog and be live on Squarespace in maybe 15 minutes. That's incredible. It blew my mind. And so, cause we did testing back and forth. Like I'd blow away the site and I'd reimport. And I was like, it was just like snap. I was like, Whoa. I mean, my whole site's over there, my comments, my images.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So, you know, I know it's only text and it's not a big file, but to get all of that format, it looked like that was where the site had always been. Right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Really, really great stuff. So if you want to go try out Squarespace, go to squarespace.com forward slash 70 decibels. You can start your two week free trial. And when you decide to purchase either the annual or monthly plans with the annual plans at the moment, you're getting free domains, which is amazing. If you use the coupon code 70 decibels five at checkout, you'll get 10% off your first purchase. So that's Squarespace. Thank you very much. Right. So Brad, I sort of alluded to this a short time ago that we're going to be talking about work and what, you know, the tools, the pens and the papers that we use whilst in our work life.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. Right.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So as you're going, you've, you've, you've landed yourself a job for anybody that doesn't know. So well done. Thank you. Congratulations on that. It's always good to have money.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' My wife is thrilled.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I bet she is. She's not having to steal more medical supplies for you anymore.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah. So I'm getting, I'm getting back to work. I'm moving from, you know, the home office environment where I can have just as much junk around me as I want and all my pens and paper just laying around everywhere and everything accessible to moving back into an office environment. You know, where I'll be in like a, you know, a cube office type, you know, Dilbert environment where there's people going to be stealing my pens. So it's a big switch, you know, moving from home where I can just leave, you know, my vanishing point laying on my desk to move into back to work. So I got to be a little bit more careful.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So this week. 20 vanishing points.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, exactly.

'''Myke Hurley:''' And just having them in a big cup so people can borrow them.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Just laying out, you know, grab one, chew on it, lick it, you know. Drop it. And don't bother about returning it. And, you know, whenever you need a refill, just put it back in and I'll find an empty pen whenever you get to it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' But no, I, since I don't go back till Monday. So I took an afternoon this week and I sorted out what I'm taking to work. Put it back to school. Yeah, it is. It is. Because there's only, there's certain things I want to take, certain things I want to leave home, certain things that I need. And so, and I didn't have a topic for this podcast. I was like, you know, I'm putting this all together. And, you know, I sent a couple pictures out on Twitter and everyone's like, oh, what's that case? What's this? And I was like, well, let's talk about, you know, getting ready to, you know, go back to work or what type of pens you keep in the office and how you use your pens in the office. So the first thing I did is it's a two-prong attack, right? If you're a pen addict, you have pens that you and only you want to use, but you have other pens on your desk that are the bait, if you will. Right? So the first thing I did was I grabbed a Ziploc bag and I started going through my pens and I was like, these are the pens I like. But I'm not going to miss them if they go vanishing one day. You know, either I won't miss them or they're easily replaceable. So I got it. But I still like them. You know, there's all pens that I like. You know, if I wanted to grab one out of the cup, I'm not going to hate the pen that I write with. You know, it's not like a bunch of, you know, generic ballpoints or, you know, drug rep pens or something crazy like that. You know, it's good stuff, but it's replaceable. It's not the goods. It's filled with like the Uniball 207, some Pilot G2s. Zebra 301s. You know, just some good quality writing pens that, you know, that keeps people from rummaging through my desk looking for a pen when I'm not there. So, yeah, that's the bait trap I set up. You know, these are the kind of things that pen addicts do. These are the kind of things I think about because I don't want to take one of my good pens, leave it on my desk, go to the break room and come back. And someone has made a way with it. And, you know, the next thing you do, you're walking down the hall and they're chewing on it.