There have been a couple posts on how to get linked from MNspeak. One was done by Ed Kohler over at The Deets and it was pretty serious and there was also one that was just a tad bit tongue in cheek. Both raised some interesting points but while they both ring true, there is no better way to get snubbed by the MNspeak editors than to write enough restaurant reviews in a short period of time as to be able to populate the entire Local Dining section in one day!

Now, I don’t want you to think I’m bitching — for once I’m not! I realize that I have had my moment in the limelight over there at MNspeak recently with around 30 links in 2008 with the majority coming in July (8): 7/1/08, 7/2/08, 7/7/08, 7/9/08, 7/10/08, 7/16/08, 7/17/08, 7/18/08, 7/20/08. Before today, the last Local Dining post was on 7/30/08 and the time before that, 7/21/08, neither of which included a link from me. What a fucking shame, don’t you think?! :)

Now, since 7/21/08 I have visited numerous local places, many of them new or relatively new and IMHO, far more interesting than the tried and true places that have been around for the last few decades. I like to keep it fresh I guess, what can I say?

So, to recap, we have been to Blue Ox Sandwich Factory in Burnsville, Otho Restaurant & Street Lounge in Minneapolis, Junior’s Grill in Eagan, Whole Hog Heaven BBQ in Waconia, and Mainstreet After Hours in Lakeville. That’s a metric fuckton of restaurant reviewing. Where’s the Star Tribune and their $1000/month budget for me to eat out?!

I have a pretty long list of places that have been recommended for review but I’m always looking for the heads up on any new place, especially those in the South Metro or Skyways (as they are the easiest for me to get to), that you may know of. If you see a new place opening or have been to a new restaurant and want to know what Kim and I (and sometimes our friends) think, please drop us a line and we’ll add it to the list.

Thanks for reading and keep those comments and suggestions coming!

Thanks to Matt, I now have a pretty damn decent TTF font for the Image CAPTCHA which is far more readable than the built-in font I had been using.

Hopefully that will kill off some of the serious issues people were having posting comments while keeping those stupid bots out (that could still brute-force the CAPTCHA).

Everyone, please thank Matt for his help :)

Over the weekend (starting on Thursday or Friday) I upgraded Drupal several versions to land at the most current stable version. It appears that Drupal 6.x will be coming out soon as they are sitting at RC2 currently.

In addition to upgrading the base package I also upgraded several modules (Flickr, GMap — which has changed some stuff and I haven’t yet fucked with enough to fix, CAPTCHA — now with images instead of the math question and one time input!, etc etc)

I also added a “recently bookmarked” block that shows what I’m sharing out of Google Reader. It’s more or less limited for shits and giggles right now as I add more and more to what I’m reading there. I finally got to the point where I started reading almost everything via RSS to save me time during the day so I figured I’d let everyone else share in some wasted time by offering what I’m looking at.