Thalasar Ventures

Category : Uncategorized

Super Bowl 2012 KickOff Time

The Super Bowl KickOff time is 6:29pm Eastern Time.

Coronado Ventures Forum – Mobile apps forum

I went to the Coronado Ventures Forum on mobile apps which only had one speaker with a mobile application. (Sorry Ipad only apps don’t count in my mind). Mobile apps are just that mobile apps. Ipad usage is similar to netbook usage by consumers and typically that is at home. That was the CEO of Jack Rabbit Systems, Andrew Van Luchene. It wasn’t a bad event. I wish the moderator had kept a firmer hand on the tax crank who showed up.

Yet another reoccurring theme of the night was the difficulty of finding talent in New Mexico. By talent people mean engineering talent. It was problem at Deep Web and it’s going to be a for any startup in New Mexico. My advice of course is to design your development environment to be entirely virtual so you can go after talent where ever you can. This requires a more disciplined approach in the design and requirement phase of the project as you cannot rely on informal communication to sort out issues. This means Github for code control, campfire for virtual discussions and some form of project management tool that is virtual. That will allow you to scale your organization without being tied geographic regions.

Climate Model Software and Data Downloads

After debating a number of people online who constantly claim that either the datasets or the climate model software isn’t available for download, I have decided to put together a comprehensive list of where you can download datasets and software. I know that in many ways this is a futile effort. Getting the data and models up and running isn’t a trivial task. In fact like a lot of scientific software it requires a degree of knowledge. After I sold I my company I spent 18 months looking at the issues, models and data. I am at best an educated amateur.

In any case here are the datasets and climate models.

Climate data (raw)

Climate data (processed)

Paleo-data

Paleo Reconstructions (including code)

Large-scale model (Reanalysis) output

These are weather models which have the real world observations assimilated into the solution to provide a ‘best guess’ of the evolution of weather over time (although pre-satellite era estimates (before 1979) are less accurate).

Large-scale model (GCM) output

These is output from the large scale global models used to assess climate change in the past, and make projections for the future. Some of this output is also available via the Data Visualisation tools linked below.

Model codes (GCMs)

Downloadable codes for some of the GCMs.

Model codes (other)

This category include links to analysis tools, simpler models or models focussed on more specific issues.

Data Visualisation and Analysis

These sites include some of the above data (as well as other sources) in an easier to handle form.

Master Repositories of Climate Data

Much bigger indexes of data sources:

Start-Up Credit Crunch

Managing your credit and your cashflow in a small start-up is sometimes difficult. If you are running short of cash cash advance instead of allowing yourself to get a late fee.

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How not to buy a web site.

I occasionally get people making offers on a site I have done. I recently got one offer for Early Miser that was particularly funny and I thought I would share it.

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How should retail merchants approach blogging?

When Shopping.com recently launched a product blog, Whatsinstoreblog.com it became apparent to me that blogs have a key merchandising role to play in online retail. It’s also apparent that this currently is an unfilled marketing niche for most merchants.

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Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools – Time to Get Out of Alpha

Note to Google – Time to integrate the two tools I use the most at Google (except Gmail of course). I am pretty tired of logging into two seperate tools that really should be integrated or at least offer the ability to be integrated.

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Win a XBox 360 Elite!

No doubt if you follow videogames at all, you have heard that Microsoft has a brand new XBox 360 – the XBox 360 Elite. Pinging my contacts to make sure I can deliver it, I am going to give one away. (Just like I gave away a Playstation 3 for Earlymiser). The contest details are the following.

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Movable Type VS. WordPress Round 3

There are a large number posts comparing the WordPress and Movable Type. In fact based on the popularity of my Drupal vs Movable Type post, I have decided to revisit this issue since many of these posts are more than a year old and in light of recent developments are completely out of date.

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Lying? Check. Bold Faced Lying. You are Hired

As the recent blowup with Wikipedia demonstrates, its that Wikipedians whatever their ilk are largely passive/aggressive whiny people. Essjay has been a long time Wikipedia contributor has long claimed to be a tenured professor of theology. In his capacity as editor at Wikipedia, he has claimed

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