I still have roughly 500 CDs in my house. The audio kind, that is; 500 hours of music, most of it somehow not yet ripped into MP3 format, everything from the Beatles to an classical improvisation trio from Lancaster, Pa., much of it slowly being forgotten as I move inexorably away from physical music ownership.
Tonight I rekindled my project to get them digitized once and for all. A stack of CDs has migrated from my wall unit to my desk, slowly but surely making its way onto my hard drive. And I’m boggling my mind with the discs I’ve somehow never gotten onto my iPod.
How is it that I have Radiohead’s “The Bends,” and every album from “Kid A” through “In Rainbows,” in iTunes, but I never pulled in “OK Computer?” Why do I have Huevos Rancheros’ “Dig In!” on there and not Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend,” which I must have played hundreds of times in my car’s CD player in the 1990s? Actually, I only have one of my six Matthew Sweet albums on my iPod. Do I really look back that little?
Apparently so. And perhaps this is why the end of WRXP, New York’s only modern rock station, resonated so heavily with me. With the exception of two pop and a few hip-hop stations, almost every spot on the commercial radio dial in New York is stuck in the past. Sure, the past has moved up from the 1960s to the 1980s; but if I want to hear a contemporary rock song–or jazz, or metal, or country for that matter–I’m going to have to turn off the radio. I want modern, interesting, progressive music on the radio: NPR for songs. Instead, I get “Eye of the Tiger.”
So I undertake this CD-to-MP3 migration in a bit of a catch-22. I can’t move these discs out of my apartment until they’re (mostly) available on my computer, yet the vast majority of the effort is going to wind up worthless, as I go years without listening to the music I’m diligently migrating; but without doing this, I could never let go of my CDs, even as they slowly collect dust until I randomly grab one to bring into the car. (I never did replace my CD player.) Maybe I should get a Spotify Premium subscription and just move on.
Category: Personal (Page 10 of 25)
The amazing thing is: We all can do this. Now, normal people like you and me can’t write as well as Paul Ford. It’s alright, he can’t sing as well as you, so we’ll call it even. But! What we can do, all of us, is put it out there. Write what we know, and what we live, and what we love, and put it under our own names where nobody owns it but us, unless we say otherwise. I’ve made a whole list of people who’ve done just that, at the bottom of this page, if you need inspiration.
Anil summarizes what makes blogs great, and why this page has endured for nearly 13 years, more or less uninterrupted. Some of my archives hold up better than others, but there they are, chronicling my self-published life as it courses through the digital era. (I agree with Anil on this, too: Paul Ford’s writing is really something else.)
And whatever you do, they say, don’t stop writing.
Shit.
Interesting, in some phantasmal way, that I posted the above text just about ten years ago. Maybe I was due for a lull.
Anyway, between the very busy day job at Canopy and the very busy life job of being a new dad to a second son, something had to give for a spell, and that something turned out to be the online presence. All of them, actually–my tweeting fell off a cliff and the boys’ photoblogs haven’t been updated since May. (The one thing that did keep pace was @nathan_says, which you should totally be reading if you find little kids amusing.)
I am overdue to rekindle this blog, starting with a migration to WordPress later this summer. I’ll be back in the groove soon. Watch this space. (Patiently, though.)
Meet Eli.
I am not any of these people, but over the years I have been mistaken for the following:
Group manager of display pricing at Microsoft. Twice received job leads from recruiters. I get a lot of personal email meant for him, too.
CEO of the ET Center at USC. This David Wertheimer and I have swapped some emails over the years, and for awhile our companies were in the same New York office building. (He’s also the smartest of this list, as he grabbed wertheimer.com.)
Law partner at Hogan Lovell. My favorite: I grew up in the same town as this David, 9 or 10 years his junior, and have been hearing about him my entire life. From 2003-2007 we lived 11 blocks apart. We’ve gotten each other’s mail and once the Harrison restaurant booked his Thanksgiving table under my name. Someday we’ll have coffee, but we haven’t yet.
Senior program officer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This mistake hasn’t been made, but I wanted to call out my namesake. Cool career.
The older I get, the less I relate to my blog archives.
In my three years at Alexander Interactive, we’ve taken a boutique ecommerce firm with a diverse client roster and grown it into a user experience powerhouse with an incredible lineup of engagements. The company that helped grow great sites like Action Envelope became rich with brand names: Schwinn. Citi. Kaplan. Even the good folks at Internet Retailer, the paper of record for the ecommerce industry, chose Ai to redesign their website.
This has led to substantial changes within the agency, starting with my own hire to build a strategy discipline, and progressing through evolutions that include engagement management and a lot of short-term travel. On that list was a bit of a disappointment: smaller inquiries became a lot less tenable. It became clear to us that the mom-and-pop or luxury-brand assignment that was perfect for Ai in 2007 was becoming obsolete in the Ai of 2010, despite our long-held belief that those projects are just as fun and fascinating, just as successful and profitable.
So, rather than forgoing those projects, or shoehorning them into the Ai engagement model, we decided to spin them out. We discussed it internally for months, kicked off informally in the spring, and on July 1 I took the keys to a then-unnamed second business unit at Ai. Over the summer we worked on our positioning and materials, and the news officially hit the digital community this week: Canopy is open for business.
I’m thrilled to be heading up Canopy and establishing a sister company for one of the industry’s great ecommerce shops. We know the Ai approach–hands on, user-focused, client-partnership–works just as well for a small retailer as it does for a large one. Our goal is to bring our expertise to multiple market segments.
I am still wearing my Director of Strategy hat for Ai part-time, which makes for interesting days, as I sometimes segue from an on-site visit with a Fortune 50 retailer to a phone call with the owner of a small fashion label. But the opportunity to take that enterprise-level knowledge and experience and apply those concepts directly to small- and midsize businesses is rare. Not many Canopy competitors can claim the same breadth of knowledge. That’s what led Ai to start this agency, and what excites me most about building it. The companies I speak with can’t wait to learn and grow. And that’s why we’re here.
What I learned today: Geddy Lee of Rush guested on Bob and Doug McKenzie’s cult classic comedy routine, “Take Off, Eh,” because Lee and Rick Moranis went to elementary school together.
Me, I used to pick on Chelsea Handler on the walk home from school, but I don’t think I’m being asked on her show anytime soon.
Just because I don’t have an active mobile phone Down Under doesn’t mean I haven’t been thinking in 160-character snippets all week. Herewith, my observations en masse from my strolls around Sydney.
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I thought I was doing well with my jetlag. Then I fell asleep in bright sun on the Sydney harbor ferry
Any lingering doubts locals had re my port of call were likely abolished by my walking around eating an egg sandwich at 3:30 in the afternoon
Monorail!
Trying to figure out the price index of this town. Some purchases are shockingly expensive
As far as I can tell, 100% of the people in Sydney are nice.
All this David Foster Wallace is making me want to write. Which is a great thing, so long as I don’t compare myself to him
Taronga Zoo: all that. Australian animals are a trip
Remember the good old days when nobody locked a wifi signal?
Loved dinner at Fratelli Paradiso. Great food, welcoming service, nice Monday night vibe. The kind of place where you talk to neighboring diners and swap restaurant suggestions (New York for him, Sydney for me) with your waiter. Left with a romantic bounce in my step.
Every time I hear it I become more convinced that the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” is the perfect rock ‘n roll song.
Belgian hot chocolate at the Chocolate Room, notable mostly because the nincompoop concierge at the Four Points told me to go to a Starbucks
Got the hang of the time change. Say good morning to my family, go to sleep. Wake up in the morning, tuck them into bed. Easy!
Max, the TV music station in Australia, plays a remarkable amount of Bon Jovi.
Calling the cafe at 485 Crown St “4ate5” is a stroke of genius obviousness
People said “good news, the Aus dollar is down vs. the U.S.” What they didn’t mention is that Australian CPG prices are often double what I’m used to paying. $3 for a 20 oz. Coke is normal here
Fraser Suites is a grand place to stay. Heart of CBD, big one-bedroom layout, four closets, full kitchen. There’s even a washer-dryer (which I’m not using… but my wife would)
Confirmed: everyone in Sydney is nice.
Online Retailer conference has been great. Meeting lots of good folks. Even pulled off a tweetup
Anyone know where I can buy some Tim Tams?
G’day! No one much says that, of course, but seeing as I’m in Sydney, it’s the appropriate way to start my post about Australia’s biggest city, where I arrived Sunday morning (local time) in advance of the Online Retailer conference, where I’ll be speaking later this week.
Sydney is, from what I’ve seen, a bit of a hidden city. One has to be willing to venture out of the central and tourist districts, to meander down quiet streets, go to secondary neighborhoods, and put effort into one’s visit in order to make something of it. For those who don’t try, plenty of shops exist that will charge $4 for a bottle of water. Look deeper, though, and a world of welcoming delights awaits.
I have had my best meals in out-of-the-way locations: at a little cafe off the main street of Mosman, an upper-middle-class enclave in North Sydney, near but not convenient to the Taronga Zoo; at Fratelli Paradiso, a highly regarded Italian restaurant that is nevertheless way at the end of Potts Point, far from transit and hubbub; at a little chocolate joint on the cusp of Chinatown, so hidden in plain sight that my concierge didn’t know about it. (More on that in a minute.)
Point being, you don’t come to Sydney and ride the stupid Monorail from Darling Harbor into the center of town. You come here to poke around. To be on the water. To insist on a level of curiosity one step beyond the simplicity that gracious Sydney residents will otherwise afford you, thinking you really don’t want to putz around in Potts Point, so why even mention it?
This philosophy works almost anywhere, from New York (where you can have pasta at the Olive Garden… or Babbo) to Paris–certainly Paris–but unlike those cities, Sydney doesn’t have a lot of touristy crap going for it. The world’s classic cities have to-see lists a week long. Sydney, on the other hand, has a fabulous harbor and a show-stopping opera house, and not much else from a casual sightseeing standpoint. Come to Sydney, and people expect you to promptly leave Sydney, to take day trips to the mountains or the beaches or the outback.
To run out of town is to deny Sydney its charms, though. So far, every single person I’ve met has been friendly, welcoming and gracious. Locals are quite proud of their city, its beautiful clean water, its views, its Thai food. So when you get here, go for it! Ask locals where to eat, where to walk around, what to see. When they tell you to just plop down at one of the cafes in front of Circular Quay, tell them you know you can do better, and see what comes up. Deep in those recommendations will be the 160-year-old pub with a to-die-for rooftop that you should be visiting.
End prologue. Here’s what I’ve been up to.
I have spent the past two nights at the Four Points Sheraton Darling Harbour, which is about as good as my Starwood points and $45 per night gives me the right to expect. (One would think I’d learned my lesson, but I guess not.) The rooms are modern, clean and comfortable enough, if dinged by the expensive and spotty and non-wifi in-room Internet access. Most regrettable are the concierges, who sent me to the aforementioned cafes on Circular Quay and, when I balked, had the gall to present as an alternative a restaurant that proudly advertises “no meal over $10”; and who, the next night, when asked where to get some dessert and coffee, could only think of a Starbucks. In Sydney, where Starbucks gave up in 2008. After two days, I could be a better local guide than these guys.
Also, while I thought Darling Harbour would be a prime location, it’s really not much of anything, although it’s walking distance from Chinatown, which led me to a great noodle joint my first night here, where the two local women at the table next to me took control of my menu and ordered me a delightful array of dumplings and chow fun that was precisely twice as much food as I could have eaten.
Speaking of food. Fratelli Paradiso for Italian. Avenue Road Cafe for breakfast or lunch or coffee in Mosman. The Chocolate Room for, well, y’know. All delightful, and I have five more days of eating to do.
As for sightseeing, the harbor is truly gorgeous on a sunny day, and all of one’s efforts should go into finding places to stare at it from various vantage points. I plan on crossing the main bridge at some point (although I don’t see the benefit of the $350 stair climb to the top of the beams). The Taronga Zoo is a treat, particularly the walk-in section that allows poorly thought-out attempts to pet leery kangaroos. My experiences with the central district are mostly my wandering around, but the Rocks and the area surrounding the opera house are great places to do just that.
From what I can tell, my conference schedule will allow me two full days of sightseeing before I head back to New York. I’m very much looking forward to them.