Last month I wrote about the New York City bike rack design competition. After seeing all the experimental bike racks installed in the Astor Place traffic island near my office, my favorite was the circular rack seen here…

Recently they announced the winning design, and guess what won? Right! From the design competition blog:

“Ian Mahaffy and Maarten De Greeve’s design reflects a modern simplicity that will greatly enhance the City’s streetscape. The rack is round with a horizontal crossbar, evoking an abstracted bicycle tire. Constructed of cast-metal, the design is elegant yet sturdy enough to withstand the harshest street environments.”

Here’s hoping the city installs these racks in pairs, both for convenience and aesthetics.

(From The Times, spotted first at Cityspecific.)

These days, a mobile phone is a deeply personal item. I carry mine with me everywhere I go. It is part of my identity. True, as a superficial object it can never be a source of true happiness. But let’s face it, it’s nice to have a good phone. I’ve had four phones in my life, and the best one was a miniature Panasonic GD51 GD55 I got at some sketchy shop in the West Village that imports phones from Asia. Friends called it my Zoolander phone. Regrettably, it was stolen by some theiving punks. Now I use a Motorola PEBL, which is bad at everything it does and has an interface so bewildering it must have been designed either by idiots or rocket scientists. When I’m in a bad mood, my cell phone makes me feel worse.

My two-year contract with T-Mobile is up, so I can get a new phone at a steep discount from any service provider. The array of choices has left me bewildered. Here are my conditions:

• First, since I travel, I want a quad-band world phone. I think that rules out every provider except T-Mobile and AT&T.
• Second, no smart phone. I refuse to pay for a data plan. Sorry Apple, sorry Blackberry.
• Third, I swear to you I will never buy another Motorola product as long as I walk this Earth.
• Fourth, I like small, light phones that look sharp and are easy to use. I don’t really give a care about a camera or a music player.
• Fifth, I’m not gonna pay a lot for this muffler. That means the phone should be free or in the neighborhood of $50.

Right now I’m eyeing the Samsung Blast, but at this point in the buying process, I am highly succeptable susceptible to persuasion. Any suggestions?

… knowing full well that some of the people they handed it to were journalists who would blog about it, as I did here on my work blog. I give this stunt an ‘A’ for effort.

I propose a game. Predict which of the following Web 2.0 sites will be out of business one year from now, on November 12, 2009:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Pandora
4. LinkedIn
5. Flickr (owned by Yahoo)
6. YouTube (owned by Google)
7. MySpace (owned by NewsCorp)
8. Hulu (owned NewsCorp/NBC Universal)

I picked these eight sites in part because they are all smart, successful, dynamic sites that most of us are pulling for. What concerns me is that they basically follow the same business plan: Let’s build something really cool, give it away for free, and figure out how to make money off it later. Difficulty: Recession. Later is sooner than we thought.

Consider how you would feel if you fired up your computer one day and found that one of these sites – say, Flickr or Facebook – had closed, and the data you shared with them was inaccessible and about to be erased. I got to thinking about this because of a story I wrote at work yesterday about a technology provider for photographers that suddenly shut down.

I sure don’t wish anyone out of a job, but realistically, I think some things are about to start crashing back down to Earth. My predictions are in the comments.

This one is for the German energy company Epuron, and was created by ad agency Nordpol+ Hamburg:

Direct link here. Spotted first at secretairplane.

“Flight of the Conchords” comes to the Slope Wednesday: No parking!

(These signs were up around 5th Ave and 13th.)

I finally got around to posting a page of photos from my September visit to France. Click here.

I got a Wednesday Times and you can’t have it! People are bidding $50 for them on eBay.

Thinking about the fact that a black guy just won the presidency, nerds are back in charge of the executive branch, and newspapers are suddenly cool again, it seemed a good time to leaf through my box of important front pages. See below… (more…)

When the going gets tough, accuse somebody of not knowing Africa is a continent!

Related: All previous posts about Sarah Palin.

To see them, please check out this post on my work blog.