The “where to eat” conundrum just got more or less complicated in North Portland, depending on how you see things. Sal’s Famous Italian Kitchen appears to have closed with no notice, leaving the Overlook neighborhood with one less place to eat.

I haven’t heard whether their northwest Portland location is still open.

Why couldn’t Roux close instead? (Maybe they will after they open their downtown location.)

From an afternoon at Smith and Bybee Wetlands in North Portland.

I’ve lived in Portland, Ore. for 19 years, North Portland for 8, but this is the first time I’ve seen a vessel leaving dry dock at Portland Shipyard.

This is a time lapse of the 627 ft. tanker Washington Voyager leaving dry dock 3. This is about 2 hours condensed into about 2 minutes, with music by Stan Freberg. Enjoy!

Sources have revealed that the Oregonian is preparing for a major round of cost-cutting, which will include closing all but two bureaus (south and west). Buyout offers are expected in the fall, with the goal of a cutting 50 positions company-wide, including 30 in the newsroom.

As the paper struggles with declining readership and ad revenue along with the rest of the daily print journalism industry, it is amazing that they still refuse to enter the digital media market in a serious way, as every other mainstream media outlet in Portland has. Blame it on their parent company, Newhouse, which has kept all of its papers at arms length from their family of sister companies (like OregonLive) that operate on the Web and publish selected content from the papers.

This kind of stodgy, tentative relationship to the changing media landscape is quickly making the O a living dinosaur.

Portland’s first Sunday Parkways event, which closed a six mile loop of North Portland streets to motor vehicle traffic, was a blast. Best of all, it was just a couple blocks from our house. We’re hoping this becomes a regular event!

The Portland Winter Hawks owners managed to survive their audit by the WHL, which means they’ll probably be playing in Salem by 2010.

In other WHL news, the city of Moose Jaw and the league have reached an agreement keeping their franchise in Moose Jaw, predicated on the city building a new arena to replace the “crushed can,” one of the smallest arenas in the league.

The prairie town I grew up in wasn’t exactly like Moose Jaw, but I can relate.

This past winter, I had a little falling out with Metblogs. I’d been writing for them for a while, when BOOM! Metblogs central decided to relaunch the site with a plethora of technical issues. As a technologist, I found that annoying.

But what really got to me (and a bunch of other writers) was the new registration requirement for comments. A couple of us were summarily “fired” by Metblogs honcho Sean Bonner (I subsequently had my account re-enabled) for complaining about this, and a bunch of others quit in disgust.

Ugly words were exchanged between the rump of the Portland Metblogs crew and those publicly critical of the changes. Talk immediately began of starting up something to replace Portland Metblogs, with total local autonomy, to replace what was once a lively discussion forum.

As I suspected it would, Portland Metblogs has been dying a long, slow public death ever since. New posts are rare. Comments even rarer. Portland Metblogs has long since faded into irrelevance in the Portland blogosphere.

I made one attempt to spark things up, and proposed positioning the site as one of public journalism. Though respondents to my poll overwhelmingly supported the idea of public journalism, the idea went over like a lead balloon with a couple MB stalwarts. They clearly didn’t understand the idea of public journalism vs. social networking, and certainly didn’t appreciate me rocking their little boat.

It was pretty much at that point that I decided I wasn’t doing myself any favors by continuing to contribute to the site. And it’s only gone downhill since then.

Now, just over three months later, it looks like a group of former Portland Metblogs contributors (including “captains” Betsy Richter and dieselboi) have started their own site. With open comments.

There could still be hope for Metblogs. My suggestions of public journalism, open comments and revenue sharing to attract quality writers were met with hostility when I floated them before. Metblogs could be a voice in the Portland digital media milieu. But most likely it will quietly fade further into irrelevance.

Update, September 2009: This plugin has been rendered obsolete by changes to Oregon Reddit. If I find the time, I’ll try to update it.

I was browsing links over on Oregon Reddit this evening, and I noticed that Mike Vogel‘s got an Oregon Reddit button on his post. Now, I’ve had a “Share This” plugin on this blog for a while, but I don’t even use any of those social bookmarking sites.

I do use Oregon Reddit, though, so I thought I’d figure out how he did it. As best I can tell (and being too lazy to just send Mike an e-mail), it’s a hacked version of the WordPress plugin Reddit Button. So I grabbed that plugin and hacked it to work with OregonLive myself.

In addition to making it go to our regional Reddit, I also made it a little smarter about filling in both the URL and the title on the submission form (the original only sent the URL).

Now, I’ve hacked WordPress plenty for my personal use, and this seems to work. But I’ve never redistributed a plugin before. This is GPL 2, free, open source software; use it as you wish, redistribute, whatever, but don’t be surprised if something doesn’t work like it oughta.

If you’re interested in the reddit documentation that this WP plugin is based on, I found it both at the Oregon Reddit site, and the more readable main Reddit site.

The original author did a nice job making this configurable to use any of the three Reddit buttons, and control where on your blog the button appears, etc.

Download Oregon Reddit Button, make it better, and send me your edits! Leave me a note if you like it or have any suggestions.

Update, May 23: I’ve tweaked the formatting a little bit to make it behave a little nicer, at least with my style sheet. The archive linked above now contains version 1.0.1 with these minor tweaks.

Not too many surprises so far in the big races… Obama up by a healthy margin over Hills; Merkley looks like the winner going away, soon to be the Sacrificial Lamb against incumbent Gordon Smith for US Senate.

In the Portland races, it looks like Sam “The Tram” Adams has dispatched Sho Dozono without a runoff. The tally is currently 57.84% to 33.99%. Dozono’s campaign was tough to watch. I’m not thrilled about Adams, but I’ll take him over Dozono and thank my lucky stars there won’t be a runoff.

Nick Fish also looks to have avoided a runoff for council seat #2, with 61.79% to Jim Middaugh’s 21.31%.

Seat #1 has always been about second place, with Amanda Fritz expected to take a plurality (though hoping for an outright majority). Indeed, she’s got 43.41% now, with the rest of the field bunched up in the 9-12% range.

In second place, Charles Lewis has a narrow lead over John Branam and Jeff Bissonnette, with Mike Fahey and Chris Smith taking up the rear. (I called this race all wrong at the outset, predicting a Fritz-Smith runoff, but Smith hasn’t even garnered 10%. I feel bad for having been so tough on him.)

Here’s the field for seat #1 as of Multnomah County’s update #3 at 9:45:

           John Branam.  .  .      13,154   11.93
           Jeff Bissonnette .      12,934   11.73
           Chris Smith.  .  .      10,392    9.43
           Mike Fahey .  .  .      11,683   10.60
           Amanda Fritz  .  .      47,846   43.41
           Charles Lewis .  .      13,770   12.49
           WRITE-IN.  .  .  .         451     .41

I have no idea how many more ballots are left to count, so it’s hard to know if Branam or Bissonnette can close the vote gap to overtake Lewis.