My cousins saw Regan's last post over my sholder and said, "Post pictures of Jake!" His full name is Jacob Marshmellow Deis. I took a couple photos and asked which to send. They said, "all of them!"

Out with Amy and Casey for a Christmas dinner after exchanging gifts.

Is this a Sidekick 3? As seen at Copper Bleu last night.

Bill, Kim and I decided to try out the latest hyped-up suburban restaurant, Copper Bleu. It opened two days ago but we were asked by their staff twice if we had been there before. Ha. It's 20+ miles away from downtown Minneapolis in a land of strip malls and chain restaurants where everything seems less than 5 years old.

Designed by Jordan Mozer and Associates, Copper Bleu feels trendy. Not warm, not comfortable, not fun, not even all that interesting. Strange angles and curves that cared more about form and less about function. The copper exterior is an expensive gimmic. Light fixtures on the ceiling looked like massive collections of test tubes held in place with a sheet of copper. The lights on the table along with a wall of plates separating part of the restaurant looked like they were melting and droopy. The windows outside showed a patio and the landscaping tries to hide the supermarket and strip mall outside. The best part was the strange blue and brown blocks that looked like a bunch of plush furniture from IKEA placed into the far wall. They made it all look sharp, though. Trendy.

After waiting twenty minutes to get seated, we started by getting a bottle of Echelon Pinot Noir. The wine glasses were obnoxiously large and our waitress stuggled with the procedure of opening the wine and having me taste it. Otherwise she did well for her first week on the job and treated us very well.

Also large was our coconut shrimp to start with which tasted fantastic. Largest shrimp I've ever had. Our food overall was great and even better was the dessert. Fallen Chocolate Sufflé Cake... arr num num. Bill wrote

more about what we ate on his post about Copper Bleu.

We were surprised to find such good food in the middle of Lakeville despite the fact the menu was made by a "Consulting Chef." We were also surprised that it was decent considering the owner being involved with Champps restaurants and the name "Copper Bleu" being chosen as a result of market research.

They've made a strange but decent product with their $5 million investment. Although it doesn't have much personality and in a few years the freshness and trendiness of the place will wear off, my guess is with all the new money that's moving to these outer suburbs, the great food and otherwise lack of "fine dining" in these parts, Copper Bleu will stick around.

Teresa, Jasper and I enjoying some Teany tea that Rob picked up for me when he was in New York a few days ago.

After watching and playing a few words on Totally Scrabble Tuesday with Garrett and Matt, met up with the host of the show Hamil and his friend Mr. Nasty Raps at Mortimer's for some drinks.

Although it has been around for almost a year, I've never formally introduced the hiptop Meet Map. As communities such as hiptop Nation and skholla.com grow, members of the communities end up meeting one another in person for a variety of reasons. This meet map tries to capture who's met who in the hiptop-group-moblog spectrum. As there is a lot of crossover between hiptop Nation and skholla.com, they are on the same map.

Criteria for being on the map:

• You need to be a current or former hiptop user.
• You must have a post on hiptop Nation or skholla.com.
• You need to have physically met another person on the map.

While I think most of the skholla.com connections are up to date, I know I am missing some hiptop Nation links, especially from 2003-2004 users. If you know of any additions or corrections, drop me a note!

Alex Eaton hosted a party at his place with some people from FairVote Minnesota and a bunch of neighbors. We talked about Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) over beer and desserts. We voted IRV style on the desserts and the Chocolate Soufflé Cakes ended up winning. Educational and tasty. Yum.

This meeting room is so stale.