The IQ Visual Mapping Conference is coming up this October 3rd in Morristown New Jersey. 

The conference will be hosted and led by Brian S. Friedlander, Ph.D. and his professional team of preeminent visual mappers who include: Adam Clayman, Stephanie Diamond, Chuck Frey, Arjen Ter Hoeve, Kyle McFarlin, and Wallace Tait. His assembled team comes from such areas as banking, psychology, manufacturing, business management, marketing and college teaching.
The conference will be held on the campus of the College of St. Elizabeth which is centrally located in Morristown, New Jersey, in close proximity to Newark Liberty International Airport and to Manhattan via New Jersey Transit.

Assistive Technology

I do not personally know if I will be attending or not as I have a slightly competing conference on the other side of the country the weekend before.  However, I would like to meet the speakers, several of whom I’ve known through various mindmapping communities for sometime, but never had the pleasure of meeting in person.

But as these things go, you can’t always make every conference that comes along.  If you are going, or thinking about it, please drop me a comment or an email.  If I can attend (time permitting) I will and don’t want to miss out on something good. 

Gathering together a large number of visual mapping gurus together in one hall has to be a powerful thing, who know what they might conceive, figure out, map out, plan, create, build or fix as a collective, could be finding a solution to oil prices, world hunger, time travel, or maybe something simple like the cheapest and fastest route to and from the airport in Morristown or maybe something kind of odd like charting out the path to creating weight loss pills that work or a list of foods that will increase longevity.

Its hard to say what will be in the ethos, but with so many people that have the ability to think and build together in a visual mapping context, there can’t be too much of a limit on their result.

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Today as I cranked up MindManager, I had a sudden angst of dread as I considered something that I needed to do with my MindManager mind maps.  I needed to find my mind maps on my computer, because MindManager doesn’t know how to do this simple function.  I hope Mindjet adds this functionality in MindManager Version 8.

When I use Windows media player from Microsoft or Picasa from Google, those programs are smart enough to go out and search my hard drive for all file types that can be used with them.  MindManager which is a software program that has a proprietary file type is not even smart enough to go find its own files that it creates.

That is a severe problem for users of the software that happened to store the files within sub folders other than the default file folder set up by MindManager, My Maps.  This means that you had to go find every folder that you stored a MindManager map within and link it manually into the program so they can then find your MindManager mindmaps and make them readily available for you within the MindManager program.

This is extremely tedious and time consuming and even worse if you happen to have a hard drive that’s a hundred or 200 or 500 GB in size and you’ve got multiple file folder structures.  I like to keep all of my files for a project together with in one folder instead of putting say the word documents for a project in one folder in the MindManager files for the same project in a different folder.  This makes it easy for me to find and organize files on my computer and it also makes it easy for me to share those files or folders with other users on ever need to either e-mail, file transfer, or upload them to a server somewhere.

But when I organize my files the way that I like to MindManager gets lost, and I tend to lose the maps I’ve created with MindManager.

My request for Mindjet working on version 8 of MindManager

So I have a simple request for the Mindjet team developing MindManager version 8.  Please build a simple little hard drive search engine that can search my computer and find all of my MindManager maps.  It should be too hard to utilize this type of search or index type of program.  They have been around for years and there’s lots of different companies and develop them for their own tools as well as generic tools. 

They are not as old as Roman Columns as technology goes but in the world of software they might as well be that old.  Even columns get an upgrade every now and then, ex. see fiberglass columns.

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Last week I was in a hurry and made a rookie mistake.  I was working on a project and needed for some weird reason (using a software program that is not compatible with Firefox - . . . MindManager. .   aahemm. ..  ) to get a copy of all my Firefox bookmarks into some strange and weird program called Internet Explorer 7. 

I had not heard of this program which devotees sometimes call IE7, but I needed to find a way to import in a copy of my Firefox bookmarks, so that I could then use some special function in the desktop software program that I was working with on this special project.

The Problem - I lost my Firefox Bookmarks!

So after I imported bookmarks into this IE7 beast, I noticed about a day later, that I had lost about 80 percent of my bookmarks in Firefox.

Why 80 percent and not 100 percent?

I have no idea.  For some reason the bookmarks in about 100 folders that I had were deleted from Firefox.  They still exist in Internet Explorer which imported them but they were stripped out of Firefox.

So the quick lesson I learned from this, is actually one that I learned a long time ago with IE 6 (yeah I actually had used this beast before, but tried to block it from my memory).  You need to back up your Favorites and Bookmarks to separate special files and folders on a regular basis.  If you add lots of bookmarks often, then you may want to back up more often, if not, maybe quarterly is good enough.

How to back up Firefox Bookmarks

This is pretty easy.  Just go to the Bookmarks button on the Firefox menu, click on the Bookmarks manager.  This will open up a new window and you can now select the export option under the file menu of the Firefox bookmarks menu.  Make sure you send it to a safe place!

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This week I have gotten back from my trip to Nevada and simultaneously gotten back to some relatively heavy mindmapping work.  In the process, I found what appears to be a possible bug with MindManager 7 that was not previously present in MindManager 6.  Either that, or my installation of MindManager 7 has become corrupted somehow while my installation of MindManager 6 has remained OK.

The problem takes place when I attempt to export a mind map to Word.  I choose a template from Words standard templates.  The problem is two fold.

1. No matter what template I select, the formatting fails to apply correctly a large portion of the time.
2. Sometimes even when the formatting looks correct, the paragraph styles that show up in word are still listed as MMtopic 1, mmtopic 2 etc. as opposed to Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 or Normal as I set it up to export.

Something seems to be breaking down, but when I open up MindManager version 6, and export the same exact file, it works just fine.

I’ve been experiencing this for a while now (a month or two), but it wasn’t until I got into a mind map intensive amount of work that I was able to confirm that there really was a problem.  As I confirmed it, I was not able to get any screen capture video yet.

This week, I hope to do just that.  Once I have it, I will then begin the troubleshooting process and see if I can eliminate the problem by running a repair or just reinstalling the program all together.

I’m hoping to get to this either tomorrow or by Thursday.  I’ve got some mundane things to take care of first, running some errands to get a camera lens repaired, and pick up some pet and dog supplies.  Plus, Tuesday I have to cover the local election here in North Carolina for my other work.

If you have experienced similar problems, I’d be interested to here what you have run into, and whether or not you were able to solve the problem, and or how. 

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I just got my call back from the nice representative at Mindjet.  Apparently the email invitations and the account creation system that they trigger do not work with the Firefox browser.

So if you receive the email, you have to open the ‘Get Started’ Button

from the hyperlink behind the button.

To do that, right click on the button in your email, select copy, then open up Microsoft Word, hit paste.

Then select the button, right click and hit edit hyperlink.

Now you can select and copy the actual hyperlink and paste it into that browser that people used to use back in the 90’s called Internet Explorer.

Just kidding, I understand Mindjet is a Microsoft partner and all and I (unlike many others) love Microsoft, I’m jut not to crazy about IE(x).

Mindjet (MindManager) Connect Beta First Unlook | Maven Mapper’s Information

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