Mashable had a great piece by guest author Michael Cerda for employees of small companies to help know when to jump ship. I highly recommend reading this for anyone working at a small(ish) company. I’ve seen evidence of this at a number of the places I’ve been in or worked with (not just tech companies either) and would be wary if you see anything in your current situation that you can relate to.

Have you ever wanted to create a calendar in Numbers that you could printout? I know people who have and the problem has always been the same, it’s a pain to update the calendar to have the right number on the right days. There are Office templates that do this automatically, but a quick Google search didn’t reveal anything for Apple’s Numbers. I was able to find a number of stylish templates and being the car lover that I am, decided to use one from Numbers Templates to build on. I hope folks find it useful - drop a note in the comments below if you do!

Download the calendar template

The template is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Today the MBA Gear Up application for Facebook officially launches. The application, developed for Leading Edge, provides a quick and easy survey to see if you are ready to pursue an MBA. It’s a fun 10 question quiz that provides good insight where you might be underprepared and just where to get the information you need to get prepared. If your considering an MBA, give it a try.

I originally wondered about what was happening to Photosynth back in May and now it looks as if Microsoft has officially launched it and is having some success too. I am very excited about this and it’s possible impacts on virtual reality. What a cool way to go see things that were formerly too difficult or expensive to get to! Kudos to Microsoft on their success. Unfortunately it’s still just Windows, and I’m unable to access it via Parallels on the Mac. According to the satisfaction.com support forums, VMWare’s current beta works.

This morning my spam filter caught this message from Amazon announcing the new Amazon Block Storage service. I’m looking forward to seeing this work it’s way into implementations from hosting companies that are currently re-selling a service layer on top of the already interesting EC2.

One of the largest drawbacks with EC2 (and a major reason I’ve stayed away from it with a 10′ pole) has been the lack of persistent storage. If your just purchasing occasional horsepower - say for a large compute project - you would have to configure your instance - import your data - do your calculations etc and then bring all your data back down. How many times have you needed to wait until the middle of the night to run complex queries or analysis on your data and didn’t want to take down your database to do it? It’s been more than I can count for me. Now you can run the server only when you need it. I can see this a serious boon for folks wanting to do data analysis but don’t need the large EC2 container running over weekends and holidays but don’t want to pay for transfer costs to and from local sources (or deal with pushing data in and out of S3).

From the email:

Prior to Amazon EBS, block storage within an Amazon EC2 instance was tied to the instance itself so that when the instance was terminated, the data within the instance was lost. Now with Amazon EBS, users can chose to allocate storage volumes that persist reliably and independently from Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon EBS volumes can be created in any size between 1 GB and 1 TB, and multiple volumes can be attached to a single instance. Additionally, for even more durable backups and an easy way to create new volumes, Amazon EBS provides the ability to create point-in-time, consistent snapshots of volumes that are then stored to Amazon S3.

Amazon EBS is well suited for databases, as well as many other applications that require running a file system or access to raw block-level storage. As Amazon EC2 instances are started and stopped, the information saved in your database or application is preserved in much the same way it is with traditional physical servers. Amazon EBS can be accessed through the latest Amazon EC2 APIs, and is now available in public beta.

Every now and then you just need a spinning, sliding, blinking graphic to show people stuff really is happening - and besides in the ajax driven web 2.0 world, if you don’t have one, you might be dead in the water! I’ve stumbled across loadinfo.net each and every time I’ve needed one. What really makes this site useful, is the ability to tweak the colors of the spinners to meet your needs. Thanks!

Over the weekend I assisted with the launch of a new movie review blog, JohnnyVengeance.com. It promises to provide fresh insight, reviews and a little bit of irreverance while covering all the goodness that is Hollywood. Take a look at the reviews of Tropic Thunder and Mirrors, happy viewing.

Surprised by this one from @ev tonight, seeking a date for a “friend”. This @ev guy, for those who don’t know, is quite the catch. For silicon valley and anyone looking to be well connected, you would do well to be in his book. He did afterall sell a company to Google and is a founder of this odd little company called Twitter.

This morning I decided to follow TheOnion on twitter. I love how TheOnion is leveraging twitter, effectively to reinforce their brand. Much to my surprise I received a direct message shortly there after…

i suppose we should thank u for following us, but do the gods thank man for his dutiful sacrifices? we’re watching you.

Recently I was helping a friend get his new movie review blog started and decided to review a few monetizing strategies. The offering from Amazon struck me as interesting and so I have posted it here for everyone to see. This item in particular is a great widget because it puts content that I couldn’t otherwise create directly into my site. It becomes a value add for me, the publisher, because I get a very rich experience for my users, that I can tailor to meet my content needs, while Amazon gets potential sales leads. Of course I get a kickback too…

Amazon also offers more traditional banner size advertising, product links and other integration points. Check them out as a possible option for monetizing your site.