I promise this will be my last post about notebooks.
So I bought a Moleskine address book, because I wanted to have an address book that will last me decades, and because I wanted to compare the Moleskine construction to the Cavallini that I recommended earlier.
There's definitely a difference -- the Moleskine is pretty much a hardcover book, the pocket at the back is cloth instead of paper-sided, the binding is very well-done, and the paper is a little higher-quality. For something with the permanance of an address-book, it's perfect. If you need your lined notebooks and journals to be that permanent, it'd also be perfect, but it's overkill for me. I can easily flex the Cavallini, but not the Moleskine.
On the other hand, I needed a pocket-sized week-at-a-glance planner, and it being February and all, there's pretty slim pickings left. So I bought one whose format I liked best, even though it was pretty cheaply made, and while it'll do for what I need, it reminds me that the Cavallini notebook is not overkill for me. So thus concludes my notebook reviews.
But now that I have a notebook I like, an address book that is bombproof, and a weekly planner that will suffice, I can retire my Palm Pilot, which I haven't really used in about a year. I'm not sure why -- I really liked it when it was new -- but it was just sufficiently impersonal and complex to make me avoid it, leaving me losing track of stuff left and right. I shall report back in a few weeks to let you know how the move to paper has gone.