I can’t explain how hard I’ve looked for this in stores, how many Web sites I’ve visited, how many Japanese sites I’ve plugged into Google translate—and how many times shopkeepers have pronounced these old-school book straps extinct, but finally, I found it.

Finally.

Not as fancy as the Porter book strap (also Japanese), but then again not retailing for US$75, I found this one made by Raymay that was simple, sturdy and well-made, going for S$23 (US$15).

It features a canvas strap with a leather middle piece and metal buckle, and can be found at NBC Stationery at Bugis Junction.

Also comes in a version sporting a maroon strap, which I now have as well, thanks to R who surprised me with it this evening. Can’t have too many of these, I say. The creme one here has been following me around faithfully since I got it over the weekend.

After the death of Google Notebook, I had to hop onto a different service for my note-taking needs.

This wasn’t easy; as an obsessive…obsesser, I had decided on Google Notebook to begin with, after a long internal debate weighing it against Zoho’s competing offering.

And now it was gone. So I did the due diligence and did a bit of homework, and finally went with Evernote, the veritable king of online note-takers.

But hard as I tried, I couldn’t get used to its interface. Maybe I was too stuck on Google Notebook, but I couldn’t get used to the thumbnail view, or the Windows client interface, or even the Windows Mobile phone app.

It just wasn’t intuitive. Like Zoho before it. Zoho’s attempt to mimic a real-life corkboard, with notes of different sizes and colours you can ’stick’ in a random fashion all over it, felt strange and cramped, like forcing real life into a digital iteration. Like how those 3D desktops which imitate a real-life workspace were supposed to take off—and they haven’t.

Anyway, I digress. I’ve used Evernote for 9 months—a long time, given my typical impatience with reviews. Last month, I obsessively went through 32 Notepad-replacements in 4 days to find the right one for my needs. (The winner was Jarte.)

But I just can’t get used to it. Evernote’s Web interface was slow and complicated, and required you to jump through several hoops to deal with the notes you needed. Click once to get in, click another time to get the folder you want, click again on the note after squinting at its thumbnail, click, click, click.

The Windows client was a little better, if only faster simply because it was an offline copy. It required a massive lot of scrolling, and did not immediately make it clear which folder a note was in, whether you filed and tagged your new note correctly, whether it was placed in the same folder/tag structure as another note.

It’s like it was competing with me to see who would be more obsessive, and in the world of obsessive behaviour, birds of a feather just really hate each other.

I thought I would miss Evernote’s OCR feature (i.e. text-recognition from images of handwriting and printed text), but it turned out to be more of a novelty than a regular tool for me, because I input my notes digitally and almost never take pictures of business cards or signs or handwritten notes (or whatever people use OCR for).

Part of the deal breaker was that it was impossible to use within my small Asus Eee PC 701. I know, upgrade my hardware, right? I could’ve done that. Or just gone to a friendlier interface.

Like Ubernote. Ubernote’s a lot more similar to Google Notebook, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a bit of um, idea-borrowing, given how it seems to have ‘borrowed’ Evernote’s logo as well.

But if it works, it works. It’s clean, simple and streamlined. And my notes get to go back to an easy way of getting organised. I can dump notes, file them according to tags—just enough of a file attribute without allowing me to get too obsessive—and do a neat search from the side. Easy.

One point though, the e-mail function for Ubernote was a major fail. I’ve been mailing my Ubernote address all day, but nothing’s shown up in it yet.

That made the migration from Evernote to Ubernote a little more difficult, because I couldn’t e-mail my notes over, but had to manually cut and paste.

After which I deleted everything in Evernote and cleared the trash. Being obsessive can be tiring, but I’ll be damned if I have duplicate, out-of-sync information lying around.

Update: Got a note from Ubernote’s makers saying they had their elephant logo about four to five months before Evernote did. Apologies for the assumption it was the other way round!

(Click to enlarge)

This is my current schedule for next week’s CommunicAsia tradeshow, with some tentative appointments yet to be marked down.

That is all.

I had spent so much time looking for this in the shops to no success, I almost thought I had fallen for some Internet hoax.

But a colleague found it today at a PC tradeshow, whoopee! Like Silly Putty and the ’slime’ that used to be sold with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle merchandise, the Cyberclean promises to be a giant dirt magnet.

Only, unlike the others, it isn’t an unfortunate side effect, it’s its raison d’être.

I’ve posted a video of my experience with it. It worked pretty well, so I can’t complain; a lot of the dirt and crumbs from the deep cesspool of detritus that is my keyboard came out with it.

But a word of caution: toward the middle of the video, an enthusiastic colleague pressed the neon yellow mush a little too hard into the keyboard, which made extraction fairly harrowing. So don’t overdo it.

Removing it, however, was an experience more satisfying than he thought. Like removing the mother of all boogers, he said.

Don’t worry, everything came out in the end, smelling fresh and lemony, at that!

A bad smell wafted into the taxi as the driver and I eyed each other suspiciously.

If I were a taxi driver, being a captive victim to the onslaught of mystery farts would be one top reason to hate my job.

That and being blamed for the fart itself.

I spent all day with my feet curled up under me on my seat, in various uncomfortable poses, as a result of a larger-than-usual lizard spotted on the ground in the office.

On the ground. So, you know, it’s not afraid of people. This detail is fairly crucial because it flies in the face of the biggest oft-quoted reason to laugh off a lizard threat: “It’s more afraid of you than you are of it!”

It was also flat, black and large, and looked mashed into the carpet. Charming.

A colleague said she thought she didn’t see a head on the thing. But it upped and walked away. So it wasn’t dead—bad. It could also have been a walking, headless lizard—worse.

In the collective two seconds I had to look at it whilst madly dashing past it to safety several times, I noticed it had all sorts of features pushing it higher up the evolutionary chain. You know, like calf muscles. Ugh?

I couldn’t get close enough to take a picture (without my insides turning inside out and falling out of my mouth), so here’s an artist’s impression:

In my haste and trauma, I accidentally drew it cute.

But this is clearly more accurate, on hindsight.

Also, I really regret all the junk I’ve been consuming at my cubicle, which must look like a big neon WELCOME! sign for the lizard.