Imagine diving into a pile of hot steamed crabs and/or lifting a cold beer on the city’s waterfront at the Power Plant this summer.

That could be a reality if redesigns for two restaurant and entertainment decks are given a thumbs up for permits and design by city officials this spring.

The city’s Urban Design & Architecture Review Panel heard presentations from the Hard Rock Café and Phillips Seafood Thursday about retooling a pair of barges that sit just outside the front doors of the restaurants on the Inner Harbor.

Plans would include a redo of the Hard Rock’s deck as part of a major overhaul of the restaurant, said Joe Emanuele, the company’s vice president of design and development.

“Baltimore is an important city for us and we want to reinvest,” Emanuele said of the plans to rebuild the frame of the 36-foot by 60-foot pier to include a retractable roof and a new grill set up as an outdoor extension of the popular restaurant.

“We need a facelift there,” he added.

Next door, at the new Phillips restaurant, an outdoor crab deck would include a menu with crabs from various Maryland rivers (Wye, Choptank), an outdoor, open kitchen, a crab picking station with educational seminars on how to clean and eat a steamed crab, and a refrigerated crab truck to keep bushels of crustaceans in while awaiting the steam pot.

“You see it. You hear it. You smell it,” said Steve Phillips, owner of the popular restaurant.

Phillips said the Phillips deck would also have retractable awnings above an open-truss design, picnic tables and small twinkle lights to give it a summer pavilion look.

The UDARP is expected to vote on the design plans at a future meeting.

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After an agonizing, nail-biting wait, the search is over: Kegasus is back.

When the Maryland Jockey Club announced the headliners for this year’s Preakness InfieldFest, its officials evaded questions about the return of the beer-drinking centaur who was the mascot of last year’s event.

In February, a mysterious, anonymous campaign to replace Kegasus with the Easter Bunny or the Leprechaun launched.

Today, MJC announced that Kegasus will again be the face of the event.

But it doesn’t end there for the half-man, half-horse mythical creature: Standing tall at Kegasus’ side will be UniCarl, a “part human, part unicorn, part personal assistant and part personal trainer,” according to a statement by MJC.

“We are honored to work hand-in-hand with the Maryland Jockey Club to evolve last year’s campaign, bringing a fresh look to what’s become a fun and engaging icon,” said Jimmy Learned, president and founder of Washington, D.C.-based Elevation Ltd., the advertising company that has been running the Preakness’ campaigns for the last two years.

“We have again created a campaign that will galvanize that younger demographic. It speaks their language. We are all looking forward to yet another legendary InfieldFest.”

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The Asian and international market Lotte Plaza will soon help launch a multi-million dollar renovation of a former Toys R Us store in the One Mile West Shopping Center in Catonsville.

The result will be a new 46,000-square-foot Lotte Plaza store in the 125,000-square-foot retail development at 6600 Baltimore National Pike, expected to open this summer. The center is owned by the Owings Mills-based Fedder Co. Alvin Lee, a director at Lotte Plaza, said the new store will provide 50-75 jobs.

Founded in 1989, Lotte Plaza and its affiliates operate 13 markets in seven states. The One Mile West Shopping Center location will be the first in Baltimore County, and the seventh store in the mid-Atlantic region.

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Fortune 500 company DaVita Dialysis Center has leased 10,000 square feet of office space at Randallstown Plaza from Trout Daniel & Associates.

DaVita is relocating its Randallstown center to the new site, at 3637 Offut Rd., to improve accessibility for patients. The new space will be a hybrid between medical and retail space.

Other tenants in Randallstown Plaza include Radio Shack, Bank of America, Subway and Family Dollar. The anchor at the site is the Liberty Center, a Baltimore County Work Force Development Center and a branch of the Community College of Baltimore County.

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When Baltimore Ravens President Dick Cass looks into the stands at M&T Bank Stadium,  he sees “a sea of screaming purple.”

His goal is to grow that sea, Cass said in a speech at the Downtown Partnership’s 2012 State of Downtown Breakfast on Thursday.

“We don’t take anything for granted,” Cass said. “We are the second youngest franchise in the NFL. We don’t know what will happen to us and to our fans if we suffer through three years straight of 5-11 football. We don’t want to find out, either.”

If that were to ever happen, Cass said he knows fans would be “angry” and “disgusted.” The hope, however, is that they won’t turn their backs on the team, regardless of what’s on the scoreboard.

“When you think about teams like the Steelers, the Eagles and the Giants, they’ve reached that status. We’re not there yet,” he said. “That’s our goal, that’s why we’re working hard to grow our fan base in any way we can.”

But that’s not to say the Ravens’ fan base is struggling: In the team’s 2000 season, an average of 18 percent of households in the Baltimore metropolitan area – the city and its five surrounding counties -  tuned into TV broadcasts of the team’s regular season games. In the 2007 season, that number jumped to25 percent, and the 2011 season saw 37.3 percent of households tuning in, Cass said.

Cass also highlighted improvements at the team’s stadium, including the completion of a 4G wireless network in December and ongoing capital upgrades.

“We’ve got 15 years left on our lease, and we always want to be the very highest and best stadium in the league,” he said.

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Hard to believe Twitter is turning just six years old today. It seems like it’s been around forever.

The tributes and retrospectives are popping up all across the Internet.

You could argue Jack Dorsey‘s first tweet is the 21st century’s “Mr. Watson — come here”, the birth of a communication revolution.

How did we ever follow news and, more importantly, celebrities before Twitter?

It’s also given consumers of news a fascinating look, in real time, as to how the sausage is made.

Six years is forever in the tech world, which makes you wonder: What’ll be the next big thing in social media? What is the next Twitter?

I don’t know, but this 140-characters-or-less limit is pretty constricting.

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Baltimore’s quasi-city agency that oversees development has posted a detailed job description for its soon-to-be-vacant head job following the retirement of M.J. “Jay” Brodie last month.

The Baltimore Development Corp. is seeking a “well-qualified economic development official” as president and CEO, a post that also holds a seat in the cabinet of Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the job posting on the BDC’s website says.

Rawlings-Blake will hire a replacement for Brodie, who is stepping down after 16 years, subject to approval of the City Council.

The ideal candidate, the job posting says, will have “strong leadership qualities and possess thorough knowledge and experience in urban economic development, a passion for business and real estate development, and demonstrate a successful track record in the strategic planning, implementation and completion of complex projects, business negotiations and organizational restructuring.”

Among the other duties, the candidate is responsible for:

– Creating a strategic economic development plan with the BDC board of directors, mayor’s office and public and private partners
– Recruiting new businesses and supporting existing businesses that create job opportunities for city residents
– Providing business assistance and opportunities for minority- and women-owned and small businesses
– Facilitating new commercial development projects in Baltimore
– Actively and strategically marketing Baltimore as a premier urban location to do business and real estate development
– Actively advocating for public policies and development projects that support Baltimore’s economic growth

Brodie’s salary in 2009 was $204,175, according to the latest federal documents with BDC compensation on file.

Applications will be accepted through April 6, the posting says.

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Have you ever gotten in line at 4:30 in the morning to apply for a job?

One person did that Saturday for a chance to work at Maryland Live! Casino, said Lynn Norris, the company’s vice president of human resources.

The casino’s job fair, which was held Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., and hosted in conjunction with the Anne Arundel Workforce Development Corporation, drew 1,015 people, she said.

As of Monday evening, there are 69 positions posted on the company’s website.

The casino opens in its first phase in June, at which point it will have 850 employees. At full capacity, which will happen in the fall, the casino will employ 1,500.

So far, the company has filled more than 100 positions, with a few dozen more slated to start soon, and others still who have been sent offer letters, said Carmen Gonzales, Maryland Live! Casino spokeswoman.

The casino has received about 30,000 job applications total, she said.

That’s about 25,000 applications in two months: When the casino opened its Employment Center in January, they had about 5,000 applications.

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Call me behind the times (actually, please don’t), but I hadn’t heard of smishing until 6:24 this morning, when I received a text message from “Wal-Mart,” directing me to a website and offering me a $1,000 gift card.

A little Googling later, I learned Wal Mart issued a statement on March 9, warning about a “smishing” scam –  a scam that uses SMS text messages to lure customers into divulging personal information. It’s the latest twist on identity theft schemes, capitalizing on the popularity of smartphones.

Smishing usually happens in one of two ways: random, digital dialing or through phone numbers entered when making online purchases, said Tom Bartholomy, president of the Better Business Bureau of Southern Piedmont in Charlotte, N.C., whose group issued a statement warning about the scam.

Online retailers often sell contact information to “like-minded” retailers, and the information moves from business to business “until sooner or later it ends up in the hands of people like this,” he said.

“We hear from a lot of cell phone users who are going ‘This is crazy, I never used to get these kinds of things until a few months ago,’” Bartholomy said.

If your number is on the National Do Not Call Registry, companies shouldn’t be contacting you, but that won’t stop scammers, Bartholomy said.

“When you’re in the scamming business, you’re already breaking the law, you don’t care about the Do Not Call Registry,” he said.

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At the city’s emerging new hotspot, Locust Point, the new apartments and retail at McHenry Row are filling with tenants and retailers. Spies there say about six of the 250 apartments in the development are being rented each week, with tenants paying rents that average nearly $2,600 a month for a two-bedroom pad.

The development by Mark Sapperstein unofficially opened Dec. 7 with the ribbon cutting for the Harris Teeter grocery store, the 61,000-square-foot anchor of the commercial side of the project that also includes a strip of shops, salons and restaurants and a Greene Turtle bar.

In the meantime, another project is getting ready to launch.

A 200-unit apartment development with street-level retail at near Lawrence Street and Fort Avenue is in the planning phase, with a ground breaking in the near future. That’s the former site of the General Electric plant. The development will be considered by the Locust Point Civic Association this spring.

Around the bend of Key Highway, Under Armour is getting ready to embark on a massive expansion at the Tide Point complex.

This week, a company executive testified before a City Council committee about the expansion project in a hearing about changing the planned unit development there for the office expansion and rename the PUD Under Armour Headquarters. The full City Council will hear the proposal Monday evening.

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This week, NAIOP named Randall M. Griffin as winner of its Maryland Lifetime Achievement Award to be given out an awards gala on April 19 at the Hyatt Regency Baltimore.

Griffin will retire as CEO of Corporate Office Properties Trust at the end of this month after a nearly four-decade career in the commercial real estate business. For the past 19 years, he has headed the Constellation Real Estate Group and its successor, Corporate Office Properties Trust, or COPT. Before that, he was vice president of development for EuroDisney in Paris.

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Ladies and gentlemen, get your coin purses ready: The first 100 slot machines arrived Wednesday at the Maryland Live! Casino in Hanover.

Having the machines up and running on the casino floor “really brings some reality to how close we are to the completion of this project,” said Rob Norton, president and general manager.

“Every day, pretty much from here all the way to the latter part of April, we will be moving machines and continuing to expand the casino floor,” he said.

About 2,000 machines are being stored at a nearby facility — Norton isn’t disclosing just where that is — where they are tested and configured before being brought to the casino, located at the Arundel Mills mall.

The slots will include Monopoly, “Wheel of Fortune,” “Sex and the City,” “The Wizard of Oz” and Hot Shots, as well as a full line of quick hit and progressive machines, and electronic game tables.

The casino is slated to open with 3,100 slot machines in June. By the fall, the $500 million casino will reach full capacity, touting 4,750 slot machines – the most of any casino in the state.

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