Kelly writes in with all the essential details for Tastings‘ New Year’s Eve shindig…

NEW YEAR’S EVE CELEBRATION AT TASTINGS, 6PM-til ? (RELAX – NO RESERVATIONS REQUIRED)

Drink & Food Specials,$5 Glasses of Champagne, Champagne Toast at Midnight

For Every $50 Tasting Card Purchased, Receive a Ticket for Drawings:

Leanne Laine Art, 3 Pack of Wine, 1 Night Stay & Breakfast for 2 at Holiday Inn Decatur, and $100 Tasting Card

Hmm…those seem like some pretty substantial prizes with pretty good odds.  AND its within stumbling distance. Hmm.

Scott sends in this photo of scaffolding on the backside of the Renaissance condos and wonders if the building is already replacing its EIFS within just a few years of construction.

Can anyone fill us in?  Maybe we should try out the new construction inquiry form on the city’s website!

Dennis over at Next Stop reminds us about Decatur’s convenient Christmas tree recycling program going on now thru January 3rd.

Here’s the text off the city’s website…

Recycle your live Christmas tree in the annual “Bring One for the Chipper” event on Saturday, Jan.3. Drop off your tree at the Christmas Tree Recycling Center in the Agnes Scott parking lot. The entrance is between 184 and 206 S. Candler St.

The recycling center will be open Wednesday, Dec. 26, through Saturday, Jan 3.

Please do not leave trees anywhere else on the Agnes Scott campus.

Of course, that assumes your already motivated enough after a long, tiring holiday to strip your tree, which you swear you just put up, and haul it over to Agnes Scott. 

Here’s a Decatur business that’s been open since June that I didn’t know about until the owner, Justin Kenagy, sent me a note a few days back.

Onyx Consulting sits behind McDonald’s at 122 Williams St., just north of the Commerce Drive loop in downtown Decatur.   From Justin’s email, it sounds like he and his staff have been taking care of all kinds of Mac and PC repairs and consulting since the mid-90s at their Northcrest location.  This past June they opened a second location in Decatur, providing the same wide variety of services to our community.

As a Mac user (with a cracked case), I was particularly interested when he said that Onyx did “over 100 Mac warranty repairs a month”.  I followed up with him on this, because I wanted to know for sure whether this meant I could take our under-warranty Mac to Onyx instead of navigating the zoo at the Perimeter of Lenox Mall Apple store.  Here’s his response:

We do over 100 apple warranty repairs alone per month not to mention all of the non-warranty Mac and PC repairs as well. Unless you want the retail experience and want to check out all the new products, we can indeed save everyone a trip to the mall and then some. The Apple stores refer 10 or more people a day to us to do all the things they either can’t or don’t want to do. We can always beat their flat rate repairs on price and speed as well. Ipods, etc. the works. We’re an authorized dealer as well, but our focus is on service.

Excellent!  Just one more errand I won’t need my car for anymore!

P.S. A check of Kudzu shows that both locations have gotten consistent, excellent reviews (Decatur, Northcrest), but let me know your own experiences with Onyx too!

The AJC’s Kristina Torres does an admirable job of summing up Dr. Phyllis Edwards’ task of “trimming” a cool $2 mil from CSD’s budget in this morning’s paper.

Because Edwards wants the new budget in hand before teachers renew contracts in March, Decatur will probably be one of the first school systems in the state to announce cutbacks in the coming year.  According to the article, the current options on the chopping block including the child development center at DHS, the foreign language program for K-5, teacher aides for the elementary school, 6 middle school teachers, and 2 art, music and phys ed teachers K-5.  We should know by mid-January, which options will be selected.

All sound quite regrettable to me, but as I’ve said in the past, I’m reassured to see our school system being so forthright and proactive in both good times and bad.

The AJC reports that residents at the Gables owned property at N. Driud/Briarcliff have received a letter saying that the “sale of the property will no longer occur as intended.”  Most take that to mean that the once controversial “Town Briarcliff” project is now dead.

Good riddance.

As many of you may know, Sembler’s big-box meets mixed use – with a smattering of poorly designed parking and traffic flow – projects have never been my cup o’ tea.

Maybe Sembler now is just pooling its resources to develop some mega-mixed-use up at the old GM Doraville plant.

It seems like all the big tech sites are now picking up on our city’s idea of creating an online version of our little burb.

Both CNET and Wired have shown great interest in the concept. And while CNET is concerned that the idea would inevitably be polluted by porn, Wired seems to like it.

For starters, they’d have to clear a lot of the ignorance out of the air — critics will almost certainly dismiss the effort with the classic “traditional methods work fine, so this is pointless” argument. There’s also the latent fear of computers that permeates much of society, though an argument could be made that clicking on a virtual town hall and chatting with your neighbors could be easier than attempting to participate in a forum or chat room discussion, particularly for those who can’t physically make it to the real-world meetings. It will likely all boil down to who is chosen to develop the interface, and how accessible the end result is.

And after sorting through all the tech-drool and scorn over this issue, probably the most tangible comment I discovered was this one over at Game Politics (which was one of the first to bring this issue to light)

If they want to do a virtual city, I think they would save time piggybacking on Google’s street view feature. At least for the city exploration part. And then add on the interactive landmarks in their own discretion. Google provides development tools to integrate these features into another site, so why reinvent the wheel?

Could be a much cheaper option.

After all of this free publicity, I wonder how many RFIs the city will get on this project.