My apologies, I was going to work on my next post about a sense of place in Howard County, but got distracted by something I read in Alan Klein’s announcement of his candidacy for county council (as reported by HoCo Rising): I also join the residents of this district in . . . requiring that certain services, such as a basic grocery store be considered required elements in a Columbia village center. . . . I support the Wilde Lake community in its quest for that basic grocery store. This is not merely a matter of economics or business negotiations. It is a matter of social justice. The people of Wilde Lake who live near their village center and who can’t afford or are not able to drive need access to the basics of life—food for their table, milk for their kids, diapers, etc. ...

A little over a year ago the Howard County Chamber of Commerce and other local organizations sponsored a presentation by Richard Florida of “creative class” fame. Florida has had his share of critics over the years, and I came across one of the more pointed criticisms in a recent blog post by Adam Greenfield, a frequent writer on issues relating to technology and urbanism: I believe there’s a single factor that makes one or another region more attractive to the kinds of people and investment that apparently now signify above all others. . . . It’s a factor I think of as organic sense of place. Amsterdam, Barcelona, San Francisco, New York and London all have persistent local ways of doing and being, and that’s what makes them compelling places to work and settle, despite the inevitable hassles attendant upon doing so. These lifeways obviously evolved over historical time, and the harsh truth we can conclude from this is that there’s no turnkey way to join their ranks, no book you can read or seminar you can attend that can tell you how to be one of them. ...

I meant my last post to be my final word on voter referendums, ballot initiatives, and other forms of direct democracy. However I found something interesting in my researches that I can’t recall ever reading about in the whole debate about Columbia Town Center redevelopment and the proposed initiative to repeal the Howard County council’s approval of (a slightly modified version of) the proposal put forth by General Growth Partners. It turns out that this is not the only zoning referendum controversy that GGP has been involved in. In particular, several years ago in Glendale, California, GGP tried to play the referendum game to its own advantage in a dispute with fellow retail developer Caruso Affiliated. To quote from the Glendale News Press story marking the final chapter in the story: ...

I’ve probably already spent too much time on the proposed Howard County Taxpayer Protection Initiative, but there was one point brought up by an anonymous commenter on Wordbones’s blog post that I thought was worth addressing. Briefly, the commenter’s argument was that ballot initiatives and other forms of direct democracy were a perfectly valid way to counter a “government that did not heed the word of the people,” and that anyone who thought differently should hold their tongue until they educated themselves by reading the US Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and DeTocqueville, and taking some university courses on the subject. ...

Coming from the world of open source and Internet security to dabble in the waters of Howard County affairs, I was surprised by the predominance of anonymous comments on local HoCo blogs. I can only conclude that some local bloggers aren’t aware of why allowing anonymous comments is bad, that some commenters don’t know the value of using a consistent identity (fake or real), or that some commenters are willfully disrespectful of online social norms around using a consistent identifier (fake or real). This post is a primer for the first two groups, and a warning to the third. ...

Recently Wordbones blogged about a proposed “Taxpayer Protection Initiative” that Howard County Republicans would like to put on the November ballot. The basic proposal (as outlined in a Baltimore Sun story) is to change the Howard County charter to require a supermajority of four county council members (out of five) to approve any county tax increases. (By the way, does the Howard County Republican party have its own page to explain and promote this initiative? I couldn’t find one on its web site, and Google was no help.) ...

I have a fondness for “big thinkers” and theories that attempt to reflect, integrate, and address a wide variety of phenomena. In the area of national security (broadly defined) my favorite “guru” is Thomas P. M. Barnett. Those looking for a concise summary of his self-described calling as “grand strategist” and his view of the world in the 21st century (including America’s critical role within it) should check out an interview with Barnett that appeared in EnlightenNext magazine, along with the accompanying introduction. ...

I’ve been reading Greg Sandow’s blog posts for a little while, and today checked out his “riffs” on the book he’s writing, Rebirth: The Future of Classical Music. I found the riff on chapter 3 (“The Culture Ran Away From Us”) the most interesting one thus far, because it discusses some of the questions around how the mainstream classical music community (institutions, performers, composers, and audience) has gotten separated from contemporary culture, in a way that other arts have not. ...

In reading the recent New York Post article “EMusic mulls sale as digital market shifts” (pointed to by eMusic subscriber okierambler in a recent message board thread), the most interesting part to me was actually at the very end of the article: Sources said eMusic’s backers . . . are also seriously considering adding a streaming component in a bid to build upon its recent growth. . . . According to sources, the streaming component would be a value-added feature for premium subscribers. The thinking is that the economics of a download-only model and a streaming-alone model don’t work on their own, but putting them together in a tiered system could help retain subscribers. ...

Just a quick note to let all of you know that I’ll soon be leaving the Mozilla Foundation to take a new position as a sales engineer in the Federal sales group at IronKey. My last day at the Foundation will be Friday, December 11. Those of you with whom I worked pre-Mozilla know that this is a return to what I’ve done for most of my career (and I’ll be working with folks I’ve enjoyed working with previously). It’s been fun and interesting to work at Mozilla, but it’s time to move on. ...