Weeknotes #288 — Back in NYC

This week I returned to New York in order to check in on one of my projects. I love spending time there. It feels like a home away from home.

The trip started brilliantly. Our corporate policy allows me to book a business class ticket both ways. But paying an additional £2k for a bigger seat and a better selection of food on the way out — a seven hour daytime trip — always feels way too indulgent. So I had booked myself into Premium Economy. When I handed my boarding pass over to the airline staff member at the gate, they exclaimed “Ooh, you’ve had a seat change.” My card was quickly ripped up and I was handed a new one, which clearly sat me at the front of the plane. I can’t remember ever having had a business class upgrade on a long-haul flight since I travelled as a kid with my dad, who worked for the airline.

Things went from good to great when I found that the in-flight Wi-Fi on the brand new plane allowed me to stream Sky Sports. I paid £18.99 for a full flight Wi-Fi package and settled in to watch the Formula One. The stream held up brilliantly, with only a few blurry moments and the odd cut-out. I was living the dream.

Topping even that, late on this Sunday afternoon, I found myself being the first person in the JFK airport immigration hall. Getting through immigration, a process that has previously taken me as much as four hours, was done in all of two minutes. As I waited for the cases to arrive in the baggage hall, I decided that if mine was the first to appear on the belt, I was going to go straight to buy a lottery ticket.

The hotel I stayed at was a little strange. New York hotel rooms are invariably dated and this was no exception. It was run with a skeleton crew, with entrance to the hotel and the room controlled by a six digit code instead of a key card. The receptionist informed me that I was “entitled to” one room clean and towel change during my stay, with additional visits charged at $40 each. Looking out of the window of the room at the construction site next door, I felt as though my luck had run out. But it turned out fine. The room had plenty of towels, the shower was great, the Wi-Fi was simple and I wasn’t disturbed by anyone or anything during my stay.

My hotel was half a block away from Trump Tower. The base of the building is surrounded by concrete blocks, with 56th street completely blocked off to traffic. It must be horrible for people who have purchased apartments in the building, which presumably are now worth much less than they once were.

This was my final visit to our current office before we move out. It was time to say goodbye to this wonderful view that greets everyone who makes a visit to our office kitchen.

Wandering around a city where I used to live is sometimes tinged with melancholy. I took a trip down to Chelsea, swung past my old apartment block and wandered down 9th Avenue, remembering how my wife and I used to go for a walk at the weekend, popping into shops and trying whatever food took our fancy. These days, there’s so much pressure to get stuff done with whatever time we have. But 20 years ago, this felt like a great use of time. And I think it was.

This was a week in which I:

• Worked on Monday, despite it being a public holiday in the UK. Taking a long-haul trip for less than a week doesn’t feel right, and I didn’t want to miss out on spending a day with the team in the office.
• Found that I had forgotten to pack my belt. Inevitably, there’s always something that I forget when going on a trip. I just hope that what I forget isn’t essential. Fortunately, belts are pretty easy to come by in midtown Manhattan. It’s great to work so close to 5th Avenue.
• Took the first delivery of the lovely new furniture for our office. It took the team the best part of four hours to unload two large trucks and to get the furniture up to our floor. This kind of work can only happen outside of office hours, so we didn’t leave until around 10pm.
• Reviewed the comprehensive, detailed post-construction snagging report for the new office, and found a couple of items that hadn’t made it to the list.
• Discussed and agreed the office entrance signage with the manufacturer, construction and landlord teams.
• Made some decisions on the installation of audio/visual equipment, where they hadn’t been specified in our design documents.
• Explored options for displaying TV channels on our Yodeck digital signage players in our new office.
• Had a brief meeting to review the latest costs for another office upgrade. Set up a more detailed review for next week.
• Met with the construction company assigned to one of our offices to agree an approach to improving our meeting rooms and adding some internal illuminated signage.
• Agreed how we will proceed with the logistical plans to open an office in a new country now that things are moving again.
• Completed the review of our annual operational risk self-assessment.
• Had an introductory meeting with the executive partner at our technology industry analyst vendor.
• Interviewed candidates for a vacancy in my team. One of the candidates appeared to be blatantly using a web search or generative AI tool to key in our difficult questions and read off an answer. He wasn’t even using any tools to make it look like we had his full attention. I wonder whether we’ll soon need to move back to in-person interviews as the default?
• Had some catch-up calls with the vendors that are finding candidates for the role.
• Took part in our monthly Lean Coffee session.
• Had some lovely drinks and lunch out with my colleagues in the New York team. Had the splendid discovery that one of my colleagues is a bit of an audiophile and a typography geek.
• Enjoyed some morning runs around Central Park. On a couple of mornings I decided to tackle the full road circuit, something I hadn’t done for a while. I was pretty pleased with my time, setting my fastest 5km and second fastest 10km, especially as the Harlem end of the route is a little hilly.
  

• Enjoyed eating out, revisiting Cafe Luce for a well-cooked bowl of pasta, Bill’s Bar & Burger for a traditional Friday afternoon lunch, Simo Midtown for personal pizzas (“hold the cheese”), Westville Chelsea for a wholesome homemade veggie burger, Springbone and Naya for healthy bowls and wakey fuel from Black Fox Coffee. It helped that my hotel didn’t have a kitchen, so I had to get out and find somewhere to eat every evening. Good Time IPA is a superb alcohol-free beer that I haven’t found anywhere outside of NYC, and the vegan Van Leeuwen ice cream flavours are too tempting to ignore.
  

• Spent the weekend with my body clock being all over the place. Despite ‘sleeping’ all the way home on the plane, I felt completely frazzled on Saturday and have carried it through into the start of the next week.
  

Media

Podcasts

• A few friends have encouraged me to sign up to Bluesky. I had resisted as I thought that it was yet another siloed platform, but it turns out that it’s actually a federated network. It was interesting to hear this interview with Rose Wang, COO of Bluesky.
  

Articles

• Had a conversation with a friend about social media and the recent far-right riots in the UK. I hadn’t seen that a 2020 speech by Humza Yousaf in the Scottish Parliament, in 2020 at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, had been clipped and was being shared with the narrative that he was racist. Reading the whole speech, it is actually exactly the opposite — it’s anti-racist. From Wikipedia’s entry on Ibram X Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist:
  

Kendi argues that the opposite of racist is anti-racist rather than simply non-racist, and that there is no middle ground in the struggle against racism; one is either actively confronting racial inequality or allowing it to exist through action or inaction. He defines racism as any policy that creates inequitable outcomes between people of different skin colors; for instance, affirmative action in college admissions is anti-racist in that is designed to remedy past racial discrimination, while inaction on climate change is racist because of the disproportionately severe impacts of climate change in the predominantly non-white Global South.

• I’m not climbing on the Oasis reunion bus. I saw them headline at Reading Festival in 2000 and was so bored by their performance that I returned to my tent early to get ahead of the crowds. But I found this assessment of their latest anniversary reissue of Definitely Maybe to be an interesting read.
  

Video

• Watched a couple of movies this week, trying to take advantage of my recent resubscription to MUBI.
• This Closeness (2023) had an interesting storyline of a couple renting a room in an Airbnb for a long weekend. The whole movie is filmed within the apartment, with what’s going on in outside brought into the narrative by the dialogue between the protagonists and the odd additional character. It didn’t feel entirely believable.
• Aftersun (2022) is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. Like poetry in movie form, it leaves so much unsaid, so that you are able to project your own life onto the situation and the characters. As the film finished, I found myself crying. Reviews of the film on Letterboxd are amazing; some are insightful about why the film was so affecting, and others are moving, bringing out stories from peoples lives about their own family relationships.
  

Web

• I love the campaign of I Am Not A Typo.
  

Books

• Continued with the mammoth beast that is The McCartney Legacy Volume 1: 1969-73.
  

Next week: Back in London, a 70th birthday, and an Album Club.