July 18, 2025

Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1534

A quick trip to NYC. Recreating a 2007 NYC tech party. All that beauty. All those hugs. Hugs.

Good morning good morning. Did you miss me? I am back. You can all breathe easy. All very exciting.

Just back from Walmart. Was a bit later than per uszhe cuz I had to drop off Jane at gymnastics camp. Still made it for reduced sensory stimuli hours, but it was more crowded. Weirder, the reduced stimulation hours, when the place is packed. They are out of my organic peanut butter. Still no Turkey Chomps. I did not buy ice cream give me a prize. No good records, no good spray foam, no good DVDs. Bought a couple fly swatters. As thrilling Walmart trips go, very low on the list.

Join the GMHHAY slack! Reply to this email and ask for an invite if you’re a human who likes chatting with other humans about topics such as these within!

(We are listening to the Friday Release Radar on Spotify and it is currently a new drone track from Kronos Quartet. This is a pretty bangin’ Release Radar. Kicked off with Christian Loffler, and then this Kronos Quartet track, which literally just had Iggy Pop show up on it this rules.

But more excitingly, I am back from New York. Took a trip. One day only. It was for work. But in the end, it turned out that the trip was a blast.

New insight into LGA after all these years: yes, landing there on the first inbound flights of the morning radically reduces your chances for being delayed. But the traffic sucks. This week I did not feel like waking up at 4:30 in the morning, so I took a nice, leisurely 11 AM flight, after dropping Jane off at camp. No delays, quite nice. And the traffic from LGA to Manhattan at oneish? Non-existant. Glorious.

Delta has new flight attendant uniforms. They look sharp on the plane and sharp in the terminal, well done. I was the only male in first class, all women, bad-ass-looking business women, the future is female, man. It is crazy.

Once I got to LGA I committed heresy and decided to have lunch at the airport rather than get into town and have a proper meal. I ate at the Terminal C Bubby’s. Since, you know, the old Barbarian TriBeCa office was by the OG Bubby’s. Figured close enough. It was $26 for a hamburger and fries but it was very good.

They played “Freeze Frame” by J Geils Band and every time I hear J. Geils Band I am instantly transported into a nostalgic reverie spanning from being a ten-year-old being obsessed with that song, to the vague protosexual stirrings upon hearing “Centerfold” when I was eleven, all the way through to Boston, working at a recording studio where Peter Wolf would record his solo albums, to the last time I saw Peter at the premiere of my departed friend Mike’s film. It is quite an emotional journey. Every fucking time I hear them.

Got to the hotel, had to wait an hour for a room but that’s okay I just read my Kindle articles. I recently revamped my Automator.app script that sends web articles to my kindle, now allowing for me to title the articles so that the titles show up in my Kindle Library consistently. Real game changer. Quite lovely seeing this long list of interesting longreads from which I can choose something to suit my mood. Traditional post-travel link roundup to follow.

Got the room, changed clothes, went on an hour long walk around my old SoHo stomping grounds while doing business calls. Ran into a friend on the street. Just great. New York rules.

Remembered the absolute sheer number of gorgeous women in New York and mused about how it really is not like this anywhere else, honestly not even in LA, but certainly not in rural Chatham County, North Carolina. Mused about how this universally known, but mostly undiscussed fact (at least amongst the populace outside of <30 year-old men) is perhaps a not insubstantial part of why conservatives hate New York so much: all that beauty. Just wrong. Can’t have that. They steal beautify from us Texans. I mean, I don’t think this is a bad thing. They do. Ill-formed theory but not, I suspect, without merit.

Then I met my friend Ari for business/social catch-up and then we went to the work event for which I was in town.

…which turned out to be awesome! My first inkling this event might be good was when I asked Ari if he was going, he said yes. Then I posted on the GMHHAY Slack that I was in town and would probably hit my favorite bar, Tom and Jerry’s later, and someone in there asked if I was here for the Automattic party. And yes, yes I was.

And the party was fantastic!

My hat goes off to Matt, the CEO, and Susan, my friend and his chief of staff, for basically recreating a 2007 NYC tech party. Not everyone from “back in the day” was there, but there were a good 20 of us or so and that was amazing.

Ran into Caroline McCarthy whom I’ve not seen in ages and she insightfully pointed out that NY Tech has just gotten too big and it is now fractured and divided to have a single “Tech party” anymore: fintech and greentech and media and all that, whereas 15, 20 years ago, the whole scene was so small we all went to the same parties.

BUT, Automattic, the makers of WordPress, are in a unique position with their Berkshire-Hathaway-esque holding company situation, and have multiple tech products across all the assorted segments of the tech world, so an Automattic party ends up feeling like an internet party. Just great.

So many old friends. Saw Ari and Eva and Ryan and Caroline and Gillian and Basker (!) and Scott and many more. Just lovely. So many people I hadn’t seen in ages.

And I had a realization! You know, it’s nice to verbally catch up with an old friend you haven’t seen in a long time: Where you living, how are the kids, still have that same job, etc. etc.

But you know what, I think, is the most important thing when we see an old friend?

Hugs.

HUGS.

Just seeing someone who’s been a part of your life for a long time, that you don’t see a lot. Like the words sometimes seem kind of hard or pointless or trite.

But not the hugs, man.

The hugs are the best.

The party was for the launch of Beeper, an awesome new messaging app that is basically like Adium from the old days, and lets you have one app to rule them all for all your messaging platforms it looks really sweet. After maintaing the Timehop code for, oh, eight years, I was very curious how, exactly, Matt expected to be able to support this product. And when we caught up he explained to me some of the basic technical architecture and approach and it is kind of brilliant. I don’t think it would have worked for Timehop, but sure got me thinking in new ways.

Also, Automattic is one of our top-10 clients at Nimbus. I got to meet my new head client, saw the old outgoing head client who is moving on to run Analytics (and Parsely) at Automattic. Good to get that face time in, you know. Doin my job and all.

The party ended, and I headed to Tom and Jerry’s with friends, and more friends showed up after the Wu Tang show and a glorious night was had by all and I stayed up too late and it took me all day yesterday to recover and even though I drank nothing like the old days I had, i think, about 30% of the drinks I’ve had this year last night, because I don’t really drink anymore. So the hangover was as bad as a hangover from the old days. Unpleasant. Existential.

Since I’ve been back, Jane’s been a dream and so nice and so cute and we’ve had just the best time and boy my daughter is great when she’s not being a holy terror. So many hugs. She showed off all her creations from Camp Invention last week: made a morse code transmitter, some sort of rotating turntable that looks like it belongs on, like, the spaceship from Explorers or something. Pretty great. Old man at the next table at the restaurant was amazed. And not in that creepy way old men tell you your kid is awesome. He managed to do it in a genuine and warm way. I think mostly because he talked to us, the parents, and didn’t really talk to Jane. Was more of a talking shop about parenting. Key difference, must remember.

Justa mix today, almost all new stuff except J Geils Band, because of course. So much Springsteen to listen to. I need to listen to the whole box set again. It is… a lot.

Have a lovely weekend. Will be back Monday with tales of CHORES. SO MANY CHORES.

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Thanks for reading.

And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!

Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.

Agency: The definitive guide to starting a consultancy

The Economics of Star Trek

Man Nup: A Groom’s Guide to Heroic Wedding Planning