From Publcola, to Horsesass.org to Sound Politics, options abound for getting a read on the local scene in the waning days of the Seattle Mayoral and King County Executive races. Scan the latest political coverage in our politics section.

They've quickly become a go-to source for up-to-the-minute local tech news, from the serious, to the quirky, like this one for the automatic pancake machine.

Love this bit from their anniversary post:

The past year has required lots of late nights and no shortage of humility. One of the most eye-opening moments involved showing up for an appointment at a well-known video-game company in the Seattle area to be handed a carefully prepared badge identifying our news outlet as "TechFlush." It was too funny to ask them to correct it.

Happy Birthday, TechFlush, er, TechFlash!

Attendees will be able to sample fine eats from local restaurants and get a glass of wine too. There'll even be a "speed networking" session with Julien Perry, "restaurant reporter for KOMO, the Food Editor for WINO Magazine, a producer for Urbanspoon, and a contributing writer for Seattle Weekly," according to the Foodportunity.com site.

If you want to go, you can get tickets via Foodportunity's site, or you can enter a drawing to win a pair of $30 tickets to the event by answering a simple question about who you'd like to meet in the Seattle food scene. To enter the drawing, go to former Seattle P-I food writer and restaurant critic Rebekah Denn's site, eatallaboutit.com.

I'd probably go with Dammeier as my pick if I had to choose, but it would be an agonizing decision because there are soooo many other excellent choices... After you enter on Rebekah's site, let us know who you chose.

The organization has a 320-bed hostel in Seattle, one on Vashon Island and another in Port Townsend. HI is holding a meeting in Bellingham Nov. 9 to form a hostel development committee that will explore the idea and look for potential sites. More info on the meeting and joining the committee can be found here.

For the unitiated, hostels are an inexpensive alternative to motels and hotels. Traditionally used by young travelers, more adults and families are taking advantage of this overnight lodging option.

The raft has an interesting history, which WSB describes and shows, with pictures from the raft's creator.

Now if only I could get back all the time I've spent typing "//" into my browser...

And, heck, if you have the $800k, you could start a new career in a happening neighborhood.

A Microsoft press release says in part:

We are pleased to report that we have recovered most, if not all, customer data for those Sidekick customers whose data was affected by the recent outage. We plan to begin restoring users' personal data as soon as possible, starting with personal contacts, after we have validated the data and our restoration plan. We will then continue to work around the clock to restore data to all affected users, including calendar, notes, tasks, photographs and high scores, as quickly as possible.

Any Sidekick users out there? How do you feel about this whole thing? Are you keeping or cancelling your service?

Jordan uses photography to create fanciful imagery that looks stunning at a distance, but disturbing up close once you realize that the entire picture is made up of our culture's debris. One picture builds an image of a huge star field using 320,000 light bulbs, the amount "equal to the number of kilowatt hours of electricity wasted in the United States every minute from inefficient residential electricity usage," according to his Web site, where he has dozens of photos displayed. Others use packing peanuts, oil drums, plastic cups and even toothpicks.

"Exploring around our country's shipping ports and industrial yards, where the accumulated detritus of our consumption is exposed to view like eroded layers in the Grand Canyon, I find evidence of a slow-motion apocalypse in progress," said Chris. "I am appalled by these scenes, and yet also drawn into them with awe and fascination. The immense scale of our consumption can appear desolate, macabre, oddly comical and ironic, and even darkly beautiful; for me its consistent feature is a staggering complexity."

Who's tried it? What did you think? Get some more reactions here to the coffee Starbucks is hoping will help revitalize their business.

People who do the test get a free tall coffee and a coupon for a $1 off a $2.95 three-pack of VIA.

[Photo credit: Starbucks]

Event organizer Eric Pope has been organizing zombie walks for the past five years and in July, organized one that broke the Guiness Book of World Records with 3,848 zombies. If you're not familiar with these, here's how Wikipedia explains them:

A zombie walk (also known as a zombie mob, zombie march, zombie horde, zombie lurch, zombie shamble, zombie shuffle or zombie pub crawl) is an organized public gathering of people who dress up in zombie costumes. Usually taking place in an urban center, the participants make their way around the city streets and through shopping malls in a somewhat orderly fashion and often limping their way towards a local cemetery or other public space (a series of taverns in the case of a zombie pub crawl).

Participants will gather on the grass field in front of the Space Needle at 3 p.m. and start the walk a little before 5 p.m. There's also a rock concert, Zombie Karaoke and a Thriller sing-along planned.

If you go, you'll see lots of people cooking their catch right there on the beach. Count me in for clams dredged in seasoned flour and cooked in browned butter in a cast iron pan. If that's not fancy enough for you, try these tasty recipes.

Oh, and don't forget your license, as the Department of Fish and Wildlife routinely patrols the beaches.