Jim DeLaHunt, world-ready

Welcome to Vancouver, B.C. You want to get involved in the entrepreneurial technology startup “scene” here? That is wonderful. Here is my current list of activities and organisations that form good entry points into the entrepreneurship community in Vancouver. Check them out. Participate in what interests you. Ask at these events for further suggestions. Enjoy!

Note that I am not an authority on the totality of entrepreneurship in this area. I am just an ordinary participant. This is my worm’s-eye view. It’s probably incomplete. Perhaps others will post in the comments the wonderful events and orgs that I missed. But this at least will get you started. Continue Reading »

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Last month, the Vancouver Opera announced that it was going to have one more year of a regular season, then switch to a “festival” structure. That is, instead of four productions spaced throughout the year, it was going to have a concentrated three-week burst of opera once a year. Or at least that’s how the story seemed to run. Yesterday, I went to a town hall for subscribers. General Director Jim Wright spent 30 minutes laying out the Opera’s business situation, and an hour in a lively question and answer session. It was informative, and placed the Opera’s strategy in a much better light. Continue Reading »

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CZBB, Boundary Bay airport, is my home field. I rent aircraft from Pacific Flying Club there. And the friendly air traffic controllers in the CZBB control tower are my rock and my safety. Saturday, I was at the airport with some spare time, and lousy weather made it a quiet day on the airfield. So I drove over to the tower for a brief visit. I had a great chat and got some nice pictures.

I think it’s great for pilots to visit towers and ATC sites, and for controllers to fly along with pilots. During my primary flight training, my instructor, Raeleen Ranger, made a point of getting me up into the tower at CYPK, Pitt Meadows Airport.  It was interesting to see their gear, and invaluable to put a human face on the voices who tolerated my bumbling in, and on, the air. I admire the patience and supportiveness of the controllers at training airports, like Pitt Meadows and Boundary Bay, who give novice pilots a safe place to learn and make mistakes. I was particularly touched when, after I flew my first solo, a CYPK controller was one of the people who came down to congratulate me. Continue Reading »

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Today is the day. Voters in British Columbia elect a provincial Legislative Assembly. I don’t hear many people who are happy about the choices on offer.  You can vote for the candidate of major party #1 or #2, but you probably didn’t get a say in choosing either one from the pool of possible candidates. You don’t get a way to say “yes” to the party but “no” to the candidate, or vice versa. You can be pretty confident that, whichever is elected, they will go to Victoria with no particular incentive to stand up for your riding to their party leadership. They are more likely to stand up for their leadership against you. You can vote for the candidate of minor party #3 or #4, or an independent, with a sinking feeling that you are throwing away your vote — or worse yet, splitting your side of the vote so that the party you dislike the most walks away with victory.

Chances are, the number of seats elected won’t match the proportion of votes cast. Chances are, as many as 60% of voters will find out they have no-one in Victoria who got their votes and answers to them.

There are better ways to run a democracy than this. The improvement on offer now is called BC-STV. It will be easy for voters to use, and gives a way out of the problems with the current system. Today is the day when British Columbia voters can adopt it, in the Referendum on Electoral Reform being held today.

I support BC-STV. I hope that you will support it too — either by voting for it today, if you can, or by helping make a reform like BC-STV happen in your own jurisdiction.

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Do you know a blog which is by or for people in BC, and is in some language other than English?  If so, submit it for the BC Polyglot Blog Directory!

I created this directory in honour of the 2009 Northern Voice conference, which starts tomorrow at UBC. I wanted to highlight all those minority-language bloggers in BC.  In a little bit of searching I already have blogs in French, Traditional Chinese, and Japanese. I fully expect to find blogs in simplified Chinese and Punjabi as well. After all, 18% of people BC use a language other than English at home, according to Statistics Canada and the 2006 census.

I’ve created the directory on my site, at http://jdlh.com/en/pr/bc_polyglot_blogs.html. See the Rules and Q&A there for more information. You can submit listings for the directory by leaving a comment on this post, or by sending a message using that website’s Contact form for Jim DeLaHunt. Please supply the name of the blog, the URL, the language(s) in which it publishes, where the blog is located, and what geography it addresses.

I look forward to seeing this baby grow!

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One of my community service projects is volunteering with CASARA BC, the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association in British Columbia. They are a great bunch of folks providing a very important service.  But they are hidden in a Romulan cloaking device as far as the Web is concerned. When I tried to join them, I couldn’t find a single page that described the basics of who what where when how and why they are and do.  So I’m writing it, and here it is.  I hope this will be helpful to others, at least until CASARA BC gets an official recruiting page up.

Or until the one obscure BC Civil Air Search and Rescue Association (CASARA BC) page can be discovered by a straightforward search. (A sneakily search-engine friendly link to it is part of my contribution.)

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