People always bring back souvenirs from their travels, and I’m no different. What did I bring back from Thailand, you ask? Tee shirts? Shot glasses? The clap? No, I brought back five horses. Horse No.2200 HB pencils, to be precise.
Dad jokes! OK, that intro didn’t turn out as funny as I intended, so I’ll just forge ahead with my review…
Continue readingTwo of my nerdy passions formed a perfect storm this weekend when I realized that Goodwill sells bags of donated pencils for $1.99. This was, like, life-changing for me. Of course I bought a bag. I probably would have bought more if I didn’t still have a lunch sack worth of Thai pencils to review (and actually use up).
The best part? A lot of the pencils in the bag I bought are old…dare I say, vintage?…and no longer being manufactured, at least in the same location/form/etc. that they are today. I’m pretty excited to pick up some high-quality pencils for a good price, and to take a trip down memory lane back to a time when my favorite type of writing instrument sucked significantly less in general.
I plan to put these to good use for blogging fodder! What should I write? A standard review wouldn’t be very useful but I’m thinking of doing a series of “old vs. new” comparisons where I can; for example, doing a shoot-out between these old-school, made-in-U.S.A Ticonderogas and the newer models from China and Mexico.
I did do a preliminary paper test just to see how they wrote. I also compared them to two of my favorite contemporary pencils. Here’s how that looks:
First impressions? Most of these pencils write pretty damn good, even though back in their day they were probably all “just pencils”. The Ticonderoga was great (as expected) but the Berol Integrity was surprisingly good as well, and I don’t think I disliked any of them.
Must have been nice to be able to just pick up any old pencil off the shelf and know it was going to be a solid writer and not frustrate the hell out of you!
Skip this article if you think capitalism is swell or that “Going Galt” would accomplish anything other than huge embarrassing failure for the Galt-goers.
I came late to the investment game, mostly due to a perception that getting involved in the market was something that only suckers, and (more importantly) rich people who don’t want to work for a living, do. I imagined investing as mainly a way for silver-spoon babies to gain an ownership share of a business upon whose shop floor they will never set foot, and to siphon off unearned profits from the people who actually work there. For those of us who actually do work for a living, I reasoned that investing was a trick to get us to lend money we earned through our labor, to people who haven’t ever earned money through labor of their own, so that they can finance their business without ever getting their hands dirty.
In short, I felt like investing was only for bourgeois scum, or for working people who are getting fleeced by bourgeois scum. But I’ve changed my mind.
Continue readingArriving in Surat Thani a few hours before my train was scheduled to depart, I had free reign to take in the local market a couple of blocks from the station. It was there that I happened upon one of the many tiny office supply shops I’d grown to love browsing during my stay in Thailand. And inside I found one of the more interesting pencils of my trip: the Lyra Groove Slim.
Although I picked up the Groove Slim in Thailand, where most pencils are locally-made, this isn’t a Thai pencil at all — it’s German! Lyra is a German company with a long history of making pencils. Today it’s owned by the FILA group, which also owns Dixon pencils among many others. Apparently the Lyra pencils are still made in Germany. A Google search for the company indicates that they’re most famous for their colored pencils, but here we have a graphite example. So let’s get to it!
Continue readingOne thing that’s ubiquitous in Thailand is the 7-Eleven convenience store. Almost every street corner in Thailand features a 7-Eleven. And almost every 7-Eleven in Thailand features small packets containing a few black-lacquered, unassuming pencils that can be yours for a handful of Baht: the Faber-Castell 1112.
Information on the internet is sparse, and the little packet they came in is long-gone (not that I could decipher the Thai writing anyway), but from what I can tell, these little black fellas are manufactured in Thailand, as are most of the pencils commonly found there. The flat-black finish with silver printing and ferrule, holding a white nub eraser, is nothing magnificent but is presentable, especially when compared to the typical schoolhouse yellow pencil. The quality of the imprint stands up just fine.
Sharpening the 1112 is a generally good experience, with the shavings peeling off smoothly in one long ribbon. The whiteish wood doesn’t seem to be the best quality; sharpening reveals pits and streaks, and the wood near the tip occasionally splinters away from the graphite. However the graphite seems to be uniformly centered in the specimens I picked up, and the wood does the job it’s assigned to do — hold the graphite — OK. [Update: having gained some experience with other Asian pencils, I now believe that this wood is Jelutong, a tree native to southern Asia. The species is known to be illegally harvested from rainforests in Indonesia, making Jelutong pencils controversial. That said, it is also grown commercially in tree farms, and is a protected species in Thailand; so I don’t necessarily have an ethical problem with its use…and it seems to work fine for making pencils.]
OK, so it looks and sharpens OK, but how does it perform? Pretty darn good. Writing with the 1112 leaves a nice, dark mark that really does it for me. One would expect the line left by the 1112 to be a bit more bold than the standard HB graphite, since this pencil is a 2B. However, I’d say the quality of the mark left behind is on par with the Palomino Blackwing Pearl (my pencil of choice when I’m feeling fancy).
While we’re comparing the two, let’s talk about smudginess: the 1112 smudges about the same — perhaps a little more — than the Pearl, and a little smudginess is to be expected of a 2B core. That said, it’s not nearly as bad as the Chinese HB Ticonderoga Blacks I keep on my work desk, so it’s definitely not awful.
The eraser on the party-end of the 1112 is soft and fully functional, stacking up comparably to the competitors I compared it against. The eraseability of the graphite mark itself is fine, also — not remarkable, but pretty good.
The feeling in the hand while writing is a bit scratchier than the silky Pearl, but is smooth enough for my tastes. Point retention isn’t this pencil’s strong point — you’ll find yourself sharpening several times a page, but again, it’s a 2B, so that comes with the territory. Supposedly it is “break resistant due to a special bonding process” (I am assuming that refers to the core) but I’m not sure that I’ve noticed anything remarkable about the break resistance, for better or worse.
The matte-black finish of the standard-hex barrel is actually a bit grippier than the slicker, glossy finishes on the Blackwings, Ticonderogas, etc. I have on hand. According to the Faber-Castell website, it is an environmentally-friendly water-based lacquer. It feels nice, looks good enough, and scores points with the Earth Mother? OK, I’m down.
The Faber-Castell 1112 is a solid workhorse of a pencil. It writes quite nicely while also holding its own in terms of aesthetics, smudginess, erasability, and feel. I’m definitely not a cedar snob, although I do think they could choose a better wood, as there are some pits and such that interfere with an otherwise-pleasant sharpening experience. However, that’s not annoying enough to turn me off to the 1112.
In fact, during my time in Thailand, I used the 1112 as a “daily writer” despite having numerous other American and Asian pencils readily available. The only problem? Getting your hands on them if you’re not Thai! There are a few sources on Amazon but it’s hit or miss and the price is relatively high.
But next time you find yourself in a Thai 7-Eleven, make sure you pick up a little packet of Faber-Castell 1112’s. You won’t regret it.
I just got back from two weeks in Thailand. I have so many blog ideas inspired by my trip! The most obvious being a multi-part travel guide to the country.
I also bought a lot of pencils over there. Like…I may have gotten carried away. I stumbled upon numerous tiny, cramped, labyrinthine office supply shops; and even the pervasive 7-11 stores had something to offer. Here’s a sampling of my haul (note that I bought multiple of each, an entire dozen when it was available at a good price, so this is just the tip of the iceberg):
I’m pretty impressed with some of the ones I’ve used already. Ideally I’d like to review all of these pencils, and track down suppliers for obtaining the good ones in the US. It seems like most of the are actually made in Thailand. They apparently have a pretty thriving pencil industry, which is awesome, and I’m glad to be able to add some fresh stuff to the pencil blogosphere, but I’m a little bit afraid that I’ll fall in love with a pencil that I have to go all the way back to Thailand to get!
And that’s not to mention posts about food, adventures, and good ol’ photo dumps. Plus some non-Thailand content to break it up.
That’s a lot of blog post fodder. We’ll see how many of these post ideas pan out!
I recently wrote an article on how new, small-budget investors might underestimate how significant the transaction fees that brokerages charge can be, compared to the value of the securities they own. But there is also a class of investors who might think they are avoiding all of this hassle by using a simple robo-advisor service such as Acorns. You’re not really trading with these services, so you’re not really incurring those fees, right?
Wrong! Because Acorns charges $1 per month just to keep an account open with them, even if you leave all of you money in your account and never switch between the portfolios they offer.
But $1 a month isn’t much, right? It doesn’t seem like it. You can’t even get a can of soda from a vending machine for that much. However, Acorns is geared toward small investments such as “round-ups”; and when you’re dealing with small amounts of money, $1 can put a real ding in your rate of return.
Continue readingI keep a journal on paper. I keep my to-do list on paper. I keep a hard-copy address book. I still use a written planner.
I hear the scoffs. “Why don’t you just use an app on your phone?” Sure, there’s an app for all of the above functions on the device I already carry around in my pocket. So why add more stuff to lug around?
Well, I have my reasons…
Continue readingAt this point I still consider myself a neophyte in the investing game, but I have already learned a lot — sadly, some of it has been by trial and error.
I got into investing by opening a Roth IRA at E*Trade. I knew little or nothing about investing when I did this. I actually had no idea that I had to deliberately invest my own money to make an IRA work. I opened an account, funded it, and let the money sit there; then I checked back months later and was totally confused when my balance was exactly the same. I thought it was like my work 401(k) account where someone took my money and did some Wall Street magic to make it turn into more money. Then it dawned on me I would actually have to trade securities in order for my IRA to yield more than a savings account.
So, I started investing in mutual funds. I think mutual funds are a great way to get started for new investors. For those who don’t know, mutual funds are like a “basket” of stocks/bonds/whatever. At E*Trade (and I presume other brokers) there is a selection available that have no fees to trade, the only catch being you have to hold them for 90 days or something like that, which is fine because the best way to get above-average returns is to buy and hold for the long haul (but that’s a topic for another blog post) instead of trying to constantly trade. You also don’t have to buy shares in whole increments; you can choose a dollar value that you want to invest in the fund. Some mutual funds have minimum amounts you have to invest to buy-in, but E*Trade offers many that don’t. So, the advantage for new investors is that there is literally no minimum amount you need to invest, you can instantly diversify your portfolio (another important topic for another day) by picking a few mutual funds that have a variety of assets in their “basket”, and you can avoid fees that eat into your gains.
Continue readingI have burned through a lot of pencils in the last several months. This leads to an interesting paradox: I desire pencils that write well, but are also easily to replenish in terms of both money and effort spent to acquire them.
Before I got my hands on the very-hip Palomino Blackwing models, my intro (back) into the world of pencils was the classic yellow Dixon Ticonderoga pencil. I chose that one simply because it appeared to be the highest-quality one that the office supply store had available. I enjoyed writing with it so much that I decided to stop hassling with ink pens and make the switch to graphite for my daily writing needs.
But pencils still had a stigma attached to them — weren’t wooden pencils for little kids? So I did some reading, which eventually led me to Blackwing pencils. After using one of those, I realized how faint and scratchy the graphite in the Ticonderoga pencils was in comparison to the smooth, dark lines of the Blackwing. I was sold, and I was never going back.
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Rad Dad AK 