People generating power by bicycle to charge their devices after Hurricance Sandy left a good chunk of NYC without power:

This is why I love New York.

I love Bill Murray.

Skid Row Big Bird is now on Twitter. Quick thinking, PBS.

via PaidContent

Last year filmmaker Nirvan Mullick made a film about a 9-year-old boy, Caine, who had made a cardboard arcade in his dad’s auto body shop in LA. The film was called, Caine’s Arcade.

The film’s goal was to raise $25,000 for Caine’s college fund. He ended up getting well over 4 times that amount.

The non-profit Imagination Foundation was spawned from the film:

The Imagination Foundation is launching the first ever Global Cardboard Challenge, inviting the world to play while raising funds to foster creativity and entrepreneurship in kids.

September will be the month to organize and build, then on October 6th (the one-year anniversary of the flashmob that came out to make Caine’s day) friends, family, co-workers and community members can come out to play at local events, celebrating the creativity and imagination of kids around the world.

Pretty awesome.

On a related note, my wife and I moved to LA in April and I’m embarrassed to say I still have not been to Caine’s Arcade.

I was browsing through some old posts, and I found one that’s worth reposting. It’s in regard to the infamous Apple ‘Fanboy’ (aka fanboi)—the term non-Apple-using guys call someone who use Apple products and, dare I say, enjoys using them.
This was me in January 2010:

The thought is, the sales of the iPhones far outnumber how many supposed fanboys there are. Mac owners have always been a minority in the world of personal computers, but Apple ceased to be just a computer maker a decade ago. The iPod is best selling MP3 player in history. While the iPhone doesn’t have those bragging rights, as of Q4 2009 it sold over 33 million units.

People besides Apple fanboys are buying iPhones.

We’re now in 2012 and Apple has sold over 400 million iOS devices (this means iPhones, iPads and iPods). Four hundred million.
Let me repeat myself.
People besides Apple fanboys are buying iPhones (and iPads and iPods).

Grind is an interesting co-workspace on 29th & Park in NYC.
Looks similar to place here in LA I’ve been going to for the last few months called Coloft. Similar prices too. Both are $35/day, ~$500/month.
via PSFK

As soon as the day ended, I knew that date would be stuck in my head forever.

I walked to work—from the East Village down to Mercer Street in SoHo. The weather was 70 degrees, zero clouds, zero humidity. It’s sadly ironic, but whenever I feel perfect weather, I think of 9/11.

I watched the towers fall from my boss’ roof. I could feel the ground shake when each tower fell. In the distance you could hear people screaming. When I left work later in the day, the streets were deserted. Lower Manhattan felt like a movie set. No cars. Very few people. It was surreal.

My girlfriend, who would later become my wife, lived in Queens and since the subways had all been shut down, I couldn’t get to her. So I put on my rollerblades and rollerbladed from East Village, over the Queensboro Bridge, to Astoria Queens, about 5 miles. Every now and then a police car would pass me coming from Ground Zero, tossing dust and debris in my face. For the next month, the smell of burning iron swept through my windows.

Below are some photos I took on my walk to work 11 years ago today.

via GIF Movie

Busy Monday, just links:
Despite the sorry state of the (print) magazine industry, Dan Frommer thinks its a great time for magazines.
Jason Fried has a piece in the NYTimes Opinions section and over at his company blog he connects the dots on how it happened.
Speaking of print, Graphic-ExchanGE always features some gourmet shit. Why do they insist on not deep-linking to their posts? All I have are their RSS pages. I love you, GE, but I hate you too.
Evan Williams (co-founder of Blogger, Twitter) is up to something new.
The Great Discontent has a profile up of Seth Godin. I’m loving their responsive layout too.
Social Print Studio has a great site and some great projects.
The history of revolutionary interfaces. (via The Loop)
This seems to be the year of video game-related Kickstarter projects. Panetary Annihilation looks incredible.
Steven Heller has what looks to be an awesome new book out on Comics Sketchbooks.

The Internet is asking Marissa Mayer, the new CEO of Yahoo, to make Flickr awesome again (via Daring Fireball).
I just got an email from Flickr telling me my PRO account is expiring on August 1. I’ve paid for my PRO account since 2005 but I’m seriously debating if paying for Flickr is still worth it. If you compare the Flickr of 2005 to the Flickr of 2012 the changes are marginal.

The whole vanity license plate thing 98% of the population in Los Angeles partakes in still perplexes me.

Phil Mickelson is getting tired of cellphones at tournaments:

Golfer Phil Mickelson withdrew from The Memorial Tournament this weekend, and apparently cell phones -or people snapping pictures with them — were to blame. An ESPN article on Mickelson’s withdrawal notes that the pro golfer withdrew from the tournament citing “mental fatigue.” However his mental fatigue may have been cell phone induced.

Good for him. I’m getting pretty sick of the omnipresence of cellphones too. Actually, it’s not the omnipresence, it’s the lack of etiquette and manners.
But I love the irony of the story (my emphasis):

According to four people with direct knowledge, Mickelson sent a text message to PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem from the sixth fairway at Muirfield Village suggesting that a lack of policing fans with cellphones was getting out of hand….

Phil, I’m trying to be on your side on this one, but you’re making it hard.

Daily Exhaust hit 10,000 unique visitors this month.
I’d like to continue this trajectory.

This is what Bryan told me when I called him today to bitch about the discovery (that he revealed over an IM on Words With Friends) that one of my favorite bars in Manhattan, The Lakeside Lounge, has closed.
I lived in Manhattan for 12 years, so I understand the turnaround a city undergoes day-to-day, month-to-month, year-to-year, but some places you expect to always survive. Like cockroaches. Lakeside was one of them. I started going there back in college, around 1998, underage.
If you never went to Lakeside, all you need to know is it had gritty, concrete floors, a photo booth (the real kind that uses emulsion and film) and one of the last (CD) jukeboxes in the city with an amazing inventory of rock ‘n roll and blues. It was raw and real, never trying to prove how cool it was, it was just cool.
We’ve had some great times over the years and I’m going to miss her.