Last time I tried the Flock blog editor, I was sorely disappointed. It was difficult to use, and I couldn’t figure out how to get at the raw HTML. After reading some more about the editor, I had another look and noticed a bar along the bottom of the editor window. I dragged it up, and there’s the HTML. Excellent. With the most recent release, they’ve also added support for WordPress categories. Excellent.
Here’s a photo from Flickr just for testing purposes:
I awoke once more at around 05:00, without an alarm, but was a bit slow to get moving. I felt heavy, like I wasn’t meant to be up. No matter, I caught up on my RSS feeds, did my morning pushups and crunches, and remembered that I have today off from running because it’s the weekend. In reality, I should have run anyway since I skipped a few days this week, but I just wasn’t feeling up to it.
I’ve been setting up and running simulations all day. This takes a bit of time, because I’m running the simulations remotely on our cluster. I have to log in, set up the simulation, submit it, wait for it to finish, zip up the data files (they’re quite big but compress very well), copy them over, load them, play the sequence in the data viewer, and then discover yet again that something’s not quite right with the timing. I’m trying to initiate a spiral wave, and I fear that perhaps the model I’m using is too small. My excitable gap is too narrow. The problem is, this mesh must be relatively fine. Therefore, if I make it larger, my required computational power will increase quite a bit, slowing me down further. I’ve got another try running right now, and I think I’m getting close to the right timing. I’ll check it in the morning and find out.
In the gaps of time between simulation stuff I’ve been playing some Prince of Persia / Sands of Time, reading blogs, pruning my RSS feed list, making some phone calls, eating breakfast, brunch, lunch (with a margarita!), and dinner. Oh yes, skipping exercise and eating more. This is doing me a world of good.
The blog associated with HubMed was full of Mac-friendly goodness today, including links to a bunch of free games for Mac OS X. Most of them are available under the GNU General Public License (a.k.a GPL, free as in speech) and are originally Linux games. One of my favorites, which I played on Linux first, is Frozen Bubble. I have problems copying it to my applications folder for some reason, and have to play it off of the disk image. I was also reminded by the presence of Goban on that list that I should try picking up Go again. But not tonight. Maybe I’ll order a Go book from Amazon once their gift certificiate payment scheme is back up and running. By the way, I hope none of you have sustained any injuries during the post-Thanksgiving commercial feeding frenzy…
I know by this time you must be dying to see the stats for the day. Agonize no longer:
| Sleep | Water | Exercise | Coffee | Green Tea | Alcohol |
| 8 h | 2.5 L | 0 min | 2 cup(s) | 4 cup(s) | 1 drink(s) |
If I’m going to get eight hours of sleep again, I should get on with my pre-sleep reading, and then crash. Ta ta for now.
If you haven’t switched from Internet Exploder to Firefox yet, here are 13 good reasons to switch. Some of them are more good than others.
The site appears to be part of a campaign in which one is paid to refer people to Firefox. However, I have not signed up for this campaign. I think you should get Firefox for your own good and the good of humanity. Don’t know where to find it? It’s right here.
Let me show you an example of how important it is to use Firefox. I love Weather Underground. However, they have some of the most obnoxious ads I’ve ever seen. Let me show you the difference between Mozilla 1.7 (basically, what you’d see with IE) and Firefox with Adblock installed.
With ads:
Without ads:
Isn’t the second one much more pleasant to look at? That deranged clown creeps me out. There are tons of other benefits, some of which are outlined in the linked article. If you haven’t tried Firefox yet, you’re missing out on a way better browsing experience.
My attempts to explain the wonder and power of RSS were mostly for naught today. I think my audience felt a combination of confusion and not caring. I tried to launch into the benefits of RSS before I made sure that everyone understood what it is.
This is not the first time that I have attempted to explain RSS and met with failure. Therefore, I’ve written up a page to which I can point people when they want to understand RSS. That page is here.
If you have a moment, especially if you don’t know what RSS is, or don’t understand how it works, please read that page and comment here or send me an email with your observations, things that confused you, things that you still wonder, and I’ll try to improve the page. Feel free to tell your friends!
Today’s stats. I am still drinking water before bed, so I’m going to tack an extra glass on to what I’ve had so far:
| Sleep | Water | Exercise | Coffee | Alcohol |
| 07:30 h | 2.060 L | 17:50 min | 1 1/4 cup(s) | 1 drink(s) |
I’m running a little faster now. It’s cold out there in the morning! I need to get some running pants, because the shorts aren’t really cutting it anymore. Also, I think I need at least 8:30 h of sleep. I was yawning hard all day. Blah.
I love wikis. I love the idea. I love many of the implementations. We use one in my research lab, I use one for my home page, I set a few up for coordination following Hurricane Katrina, and so on. The internal lab wiki has saved me hours and countless hours of having to re-explain something. It’s saved Rob from having to set up some other sort of distribution of software. Now that I’m using access control lists, it provides and easy way for the lab to make files and information readily available to select people, and to the world. It’s a fantastic collaboration tool, whose power is perhaps epitomized by the king of wikis, Wikipedia. Last week, I decided that there was a nice big hole in the Internets where something should be.
A wiki for the entire field of cardiac electrophysiology. And here it is:
It’s in its infancy now, but I intend to populate it further. It will truly take off when enough people watch it, update it, point their students at it, make it their homepage, tell their friends, post conference notes, list blogs, share research data, and use it to keep abreast of the field.
The age of person-generated content is at hand. (As opposed to organization-generated content, I suppose)