I learned a long time ago that the two best debugging tools I own are a nice piece of paper, and a good pencil. What I never really learned all those years ago, was to keep track of those wonderful pieces of paper*. Especially the ones where I worked out tricky problems involving trigonometry.

See, I'm pretty bad at trigonometry. Luckily for me, and indirectly yourself, my wife Kirstin is pretty good at trig.

So a little while back as I was bugging Kirstin about some math (which I knew I had already bugged her about a couple of years previously, but couldn't find my notes on) I decided to get a little bit more organized. And I've now got two pretty thick sketch books, pictured above, with mostly empty pages in them but rapidly filling up. And I thought I'd just pass this tip on to you.

Of course I still use VoodooPad for notes, and I still draw some things out using Acorn + a Wacom tablet (with grids turned on so it looks like graph paper). But I just can't get the feel of it right, even with what I consider the perfect pencil brush, with the perfect color. Maybe some day if Wacom comes out with a tablet which has some sort of texture feedback on it, I'll be 100% happy with a digital solution.

Until then, paper and a blue col-erase pencil are my best friends.