Monthly Archives: August 2007

WikiMindMap

This is so ingenious — I’m quite sad I didn’t know about it before.

Wiki Mind Map

I found it in a roundabout way.  Several days ago someone reminded me about YubNub, a so-called command line for the web.  I went to look at the “Golden Eggs (particularly useful commands), and one of them was “wimi” — creating mind maps based on the link structure in Wikipedia.

I thought that was a pretty cool idea, so I took it for a spin. I looked up “meme”, as I recently introduced the concept to someone. this is what I got. This is fantastic for what I call “search brainstorming”, as I mentioned in my Google Notebook post.

I’ve got a lot more YubNub commands to look into.

I’m about to write another post on “search brainstorming”. Hmm.

Backing Up Google Docs and Spreadsheets

If you use Google Docs as a wiki (as I suggested the other day), or even for documents that you don’t care to lose, you should probably back them up. Google ought to provide a way to just download a zipped package, but in the mean time there are some Firefox extensions and GreaseMonkey scripts that can help you out.

Directions are here. I tried it this morning, and it worked great. The hardest part is that you have to manually check all of the boxes.

I also just figured out, when making that link, that you can paste in the address of a tabbed site just by dragging and dropping the tab. It’s not necessary to go to the tab, copy the URL, and paste it. That will make my life a lot easier!

Action Potential Video

Some time ago, I can’t recall when, Maria mused about me making faces simulating the time course of an action potential spike from a cardiac cell.

Well, I’ve finally done it. The video is embedded below:

ADDENDUM: Had posting issues. This was supposed to be part of the post –

Here’s an example of what a plot of an action potential spike looks like:

action potential

Do Not Disturb (my stuff)

You probably know the feeling: you slide your card key in the door, it beeps, you walk in to your hotel room.

Your things aren’t where you left them. The bed is made. It looks like you never used the bathroom — the used towels are gone and the rack is full of fresh ones.

Some people might love this. How nice to have someone clean up after you! It bothers me. I don’t really want some stranger in my hotel room. I don’t think I need fresh towels every day, or to have someone else make my bed. I’m not really all that keen on having people do everything for me.

Just about every hotel room I’ve been in comes with an easy solution: the “Do Not Disturb” door hanger. I’ve now made it my default practice to hang it on the door when I first enter the room, and to take it off only as I’m on my way to check out. This saves me the weirdness of having people in my room going through my stuff (genuine espionage excepted, probably), it saves the housekeeping people time, and it saves water, detergent, electricity and more.

Surely other people must do this. Do you?