tl;dr: Don’t expect many blog posts from me in 2015. Those I do post will be on micro-local issues like Merriweather Park, with a smattering of other stuff of interest mainly to me.

Most everybody else on the HoCo blogging scene has done an “end of 2014/beginning of 2015” post, and I’ll be no different. The automatically-generated report on my 2014 blogging is not that informative, so here’s my personal take on what I did in 2014, blogging-related or otherwise, and what I hope to do in 2015:

Last year I didn’t quite manage a post per week, but even that was over-stated since several months went by with only one or two posts, or even none at all. In 2015 job and (especially) family responsibilities will take up the vast majority of my time, and what spare time I have I’ll likely spend on learning statistics and “data science” via the Johns Hopkins University offerings on Coursera. I have a very small core of readers (perhaps a few dozen at most), and I’m afraid you’ll be lucky to get a post a month from me this year. But enough apologies, here are some things I found interesting or noteworthy in 2014, and hope to blog about in 2015:

Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods, and downtown Columbia development in general. It seems like I’ve been writing about the Inner Arbor plan for a long long time, but my first post on it was only a little more than a year ago. Needless to say I was very happy that the Howard County Planning Board approved the site development plan for Merriweather Park at Symphony Woods, and if I possibly can I’ll continue posting about its progress in 2015, including a look at the construction of the Chrysalis amphitheater and a discussion of some of the other park features I haven’t written much about. I also hope to continue writing about the renovation and other changes at Merriweather Post Pavilion and about the Crescent development.

Politics, local and otherwise. One of the interesting things in my 2014 blog traffic report is that my 2010 post on the Howard County Democratic Central Committee candidates is still one of the most popular things on the site; apparently there’s a significant demand for more information about these elections from people who are committed partisans but not tied tightly enough into the local party structures to know who’s who. Maybe when the next Central Committee elections come around I’ll think about trying to satisfy that demand.

As for my non-blogging political activities, although his candidacy was ultimately unsuccessful I have no regrets at all about supporting Tom Coale’s run for state delegate using both my blog posts and (much more importantly) my checkbook. Now that financing national elections is primarily the province of billionaires I’ve decided to focus my future political contributions almost solely on local and (to a lesser extent) state races. And fortunately it appears that in future Howard County will continue to have a lot of great candidates to donate to.

In non-local politics, over the years I’ve posted a fair amount on libertarianism and libertarian ideas. This is not because I myself am a libertarian, but rather because I consider libertarianism the 21st century equivalent of socialism: an ideology that appeals to intellectuals and populists alike, that (in my opinion) would be unworkable if taken as a whole, but at the same time has some interesting and potentially useful policy ideas considered in isolation. I have more thoughts on this, and if I have time I’ll put (virtual) pen to paper.

Stuff to watch or read. I’ve done a few posts in the past about anime (i.e., Japanese animated films and TV shows), television shows worth watching, as well as people whose blogs or other writings are worth reading. I hope to do a few more of those from time to time in 2015.

That’s it for now. Happy New Year to all my readers! I hope to be writing to you again soon.