NYC, Urban Daddy and Williamsburg

I was in NYC all this week for meetings. Cross country trips are both good and bad. Good because roughly 12 hours trapped in a plane allows you to catch up on email, write some blog posts, contemplate strategic business stuff and get your Nintendo DS game on. Bad because you go into a time warp and in some cases arrive home beat and sick (this trip especially).

Three non work tidbits from this trip. Scott Wolf, who ran sales for me at Vivendi, was throwing a big agency party on behalf of his new company Waterfront Media at the Gramercy Park Hotel. It was great seeing Scott and meeting the founders of that company and swapping some war stories. Scott is doing a bang up job there. At the same time I also saw Ed Koller who is one of the top media recruiters in the country and was the guy who helped me to get Scott.

Two, at the same party I ran into Rob Petrausch, who worked with us at Vivendi under Scott. After my previous post about Urban Daddy, Rob had emailed me to let me know that he was one of the early guys there and he thanked me for the post. Small world.

Three. I got to take my first trip to Brooklyn to visit my friend Tom Ryan in Williamsburg. I had always wanted to visit the home of the New York hipster set and it didn't disappoint. We had a great dinner and got to check out his place. Williamsburg reminded me a lot of Melrose in LA or Haight in SF. I definitely plan on hanging out there with Tom again soon.

Valentines Blizzard

The video below is a picture I shot from the backseat of a car that I was being driven in from Philadelphia to a small town about an hour away. My driver was a very interesting Russian guy who would only take cash. Enough said.

I had flown into Philly with the intention of driving to my meeting and then continuing on to Manhattan for several other meetings. Yeah right. I arrived about the same time as a most interesting winter storm that ultimately shut down much of Pennsylvania. I ultimately made the decision to have a local drive me as the roads were in fact super scary. The video was taken while I was following a caravan of 4 snow plows on a semi rural road. While it was a terrible storm, it was pretty cool to see rural Pennsylvania covered in snow.

So after some cars, trains and subways I arrived in Manhattan to probably the grossest conditions I have ever experienced in NYC. I have to confess that I am weather sissy and am really glad to be back on the west coast.