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Congrats to Malcolm and everyone else who’s been involved in New Forms over the last decade.   A great legacy for the city.  Check out The Sun’s piece here:

Celebrating a decade of techno-arts.

For all us Canadians, we are quickly establishing a reputation as a nation of resource extracting bottom feeders.

Tarnished Earth is a dramatic street gallery of photographs telling the story of the destruction of Canada’s boreal forest – a continuous belt of coniferous trees separating the tundra to the north and temperate rainforest and deciduous woodlands to the south. The exhibition will be open free to anyone walking along London’s South Bank for four weeks from 14 September 2010. The exhibition, which is being staged by The Co-operative, in conjunction with WWF-UK and Greenpeace, and will later tour cities across the UK, shows how the boreal forest is being flattened by the rush to extract oil from the tar sands just below its surface.

via In pictures: Tarnished Earth – the destruction of Canada’s boreal forest | Environment | guardian.co.uk.

According to police reports, two men and a woman are in custody this morning facing a number of serious charges in connection with an overnight incident at the Shangri-La condominiums in the 1100 block of Alberni Street.

via Vancouver Cops Rescue Kidnap Victim from Shangri-La | NowPublic News Coverage.

You can imagine the terror that the two neighborhood raccoons felt when they saw this savage beast approach them at 1 am last night. The incident occurred when Petunia was let out for a midnight bathroom break and startled the dumpster diving duo. She is lucky she didn’t end up for breakfast.

P.S. Never attempt to intimidate a raccoon in your skivvies. Doesn’t work.

Fellow tenants pulseenergy are lobbying us to reduce our energy today. Also giving us free donuts. I like these guys.

Forget social media for now.  The Vancouver Observer shows how big media, MTV this time, is helping save some BC trees.

Will  Brookfield Asset Management CEO Bruce Flatt become an international hero on MTV’s ‘The Buried Life’? Or wil he choose to be an anti-hero who could have used his power to benefit humanity, but chose to serve only stockholders? Cortes Island activist Zoe Miles expects only the best of him.  She expects him to come to the negotiating table, sell her Cortes Islanders the trees, and save 2,700 acres of forest highly valued by the community.

Thanks to an unusual set of events, Miles has managed to get Flatt against the wall and bring media-shy BAM into the international spotlight and onto a show viewed by more than 35 million young people around the world.  Flatt’s predicament is now the set up for a reality TV show that will air in late October to early November and the outcome of an improbable confluence of relationships that began in the backwoods of two Gulf islands and led to MTV.

via MTV’s The Buried Life, Zoe Miles and corporate behemoth Brookfield Asset Management stand off over trees | The Vancouver Observer – News, Culture, Sports, Blogs in Vancouver, BC.

Some good advice from my business partner, Leonard Brody at the GROW Conference in Vancouver.

Don’t build a product or companies that requires you to change human behaviour. If you want to see evidence of just how difficult it is to change behaviours, stand at the self check-in kiosks at YVR and see how many people are using them compared to the number of people lining up to check in with a real person at the counter. {This and the rest of these points are from Leonard Brody, an entrepreneur, author, venture capitalist and co-founder of Now Public, a Canadian among the Silicon Valley insiders at the conference)

Entrepreneurs need to be comfortable living in the space between truth and fiction – part of the fake it till you make it strategy. You’d better be comfortable BS-ing,  as in ‘our office is under renovation we have to meet elsewhere’ when really there is no office. Brody recalled giving a furniture store equity in a startup in exchange for borrowing furniture for meetings.They’d run downstairs to the store, cut the tags off the furniture, run it upstairs to arrange it for the meeting and return it, retagging the furniture when the guests left.

.You need to connect your life goal to the kind of business you’re building. Think about the life you want to lead: Do you want kids? Do you want to spend your life in airports? Are you doing this to put a roof over your head?

You’re not raising money to fund a startup, you’re finding business partners. You need to look at it like a marriage. When things go wrong or right are these people you want to be in the trenches with?

If you look at most of the great success stories from Skype to Facebook to Google they are second or third movers. The successful companies aren’t pioneering the ideas, they are executing them better.

Stop chasing the billion dollar company. “It’s like chasing a unicorn, it does not in general terms exist,”  says Brody. Less than one per cent of entrepreneurs will build a $1 billion company. It makes far more sense to fund and grow middle market companies.

50 per cent of the time people will tell you you are an idiot (Brody was somewhat more colourful but this is a family newspaper and all that). They may be right but even at the peak of your career you’ll hear it.

Read the rest of Gillian Shaw’s article here:  10 Lessons Learned at GROW 2010 – Digital Life.

Sadly, Vancouver is still not on Facebook’s map:

An interesting question for Canadians posed by the Vancouver Sun:

A looming referendum in California on whether to legalize marijuana has fuelled a debate among bloggers and pundits over this question: Could legalization in the United States cripple the Canadian economy?

via A budding menace.

From NowPublic:

Vancouver Police are releasing details of an overnight shooting. Around 1:30 a.m. on the morning of August 6th, Vancouver Police responded to reports of shots fired in the area of Trafalgar Street and West 15th Avenue.

via Overnight shooting on Vancouver’s West Side: Trafalgar & 15th. | NowPublic News Coverage.