The GA House of Reps killed the Sunday alcohol sales bill today, along with the bill that would have doubled the homestead exemption for residents from $2k to $4k.

In terms of the alcohol bill, I’m not all that concerned about it anymore.  After three years of trying to get this bill out of the state house, I’m content with buying all my alcohol on Saturday.  As for the symbolic, “we are not a backwater” argument to passing it…I would like to point out that Connecticut still has the same law on its books.  So, whatever.  Can’t wait to read about it again next year!

As for the Homestead increase…good riddance.  I know lots of people are hurting out there right now, trying to make ends meet for a variety of reasons, but increasing the homestead in a year when all local governments are (hopefully) trying to “readjust” their budgets to this new economy, is just plain mean.  Let’s at least give the locals a little time before we up and tighten the belt on them further. Also as I’ve said before, it sure would be less hypocritical for the state to pass this bill after it had provided its own state tax relief.

Yeah, doesn’t feel so great when you’re on the receiving end of random, statistical assertions, does it?

If you are a true “new media” geek, I’m sure this story is so 9:30a this morning, but I just need to do a little wrath-venting… so please humor me.

Business Week recently ranked the nation’s unhappiest cities based on a bunch of strange qualifiers, which included such things as depression, suicide rates, crime, divorce rate and cloudy days.  Yeah, cloudy days.

Atlanta ranked 10th based on this random assortment of weird stats, mostly because of the crime rate (#2).  But whatever.  Congrats Atlanta, add “Unhappy” to your scrapbook of useless, but endlessly blogged and tweeted about city rankers!

The real shocker in my opinion is the #1 unhappy city.  Seriously?  How’s that possible?

OK, sorry about that.  I guess I’m just lashing out because I’m still going through the acceptance phase of acknowledging my general “unhappiness”.  Thanks for the intervention BusinessWeek!

* “Stupid” rankings are based on # of pointless, competitive rankers produced by a publication in a given year/month/whatever.

Pic Courtesy of GA Conservancy

According to the AJC, a group of students at Renfroe Middle School took first place in the Georgia Conservancy’s annual Youth Environmental Symposium, claiming an $1,000 prize.

From the Georgia Conservancy’s website…

Renfroe Middle School in Decatur, Ga., took top prize in this year’s Youth Environmental Symposium, held on Feb. 27, 2009. For their environmental project, Renfroe students hosted a 2nd Annual Global Warming Action Conference to create awareness in the community of the effects of climate change. They also created infomercials, experiment demonstrations and carbon footprint calculations. Congratulations to Renfroe Middle School!

Renfroe beat out second-place Druid Hills High School for the award.  Get that?  Our MIDDLE school beat out the neighboring HIGH school.

Nice work kids!

The 13th Floor blog over at Governing.com uses Virtual Decatur as an example of the “leeriness” residents feel when their cities venture online.

But just so we’re clear, I may indeed be hesitant to embrace “Virtual Decatur“, but at the same time I fully embrace Open City Hall, the online requests/concerns site, the Decatur Minute, and any future, full-fledged redesign of the city’s hefty but scattered website.

So, let’s try not to peg those who are highly skeptical of this idea as “anti-technology”.   In fact, I would bet that the more tech-savvy the person, the less likely they would be to embrace this idea.  Second Life now sits comfortably in 2007′s wastepaper basket, and was never a place where people got together to have substantive conversations.  Instead it served as more of an alternate reality for players.  Combined with an assumed high-cost, these things indeed make me “leery” of the idea.

But that’s just my opinion.  Though I guess I could be perceived as biased, since this is currently where many of the city’s online interactions occur.

h/t: InDecatur

BTW, the RFI’s for this project were due February 13th.  The next step is to invite vendors to demonstrate the project, but that date is still TBD according to the city’s website.