Parksville Lake Front
Turned out, in 2000 and 2001, the well-respected niche film company Shooting Gallery made a content internet play- just like everyone else in NY and CA- using the dollars of the trust fund kids, commingling film funds and other funds, obfuscation with the accounting and just a lot of fast and loose with the book-keeping in hopes of cashing out in a IPO - ie, the dot-com boom and bust era.
We had a floor of desks and chairs and fake employees. We began hiring and launching some of the first quality content on the internet in terms of production quality, well ahead of its time. As for real employees the company went from 15 to hundreds in months, most with nothing real to do.
The problem with being well ahead of your time - be it Michael Bury when he was shorting housing stocks or electric car makers before ubiquitous charging stations - sometimes the infrastructure isn’t there -so while Shooting Gallery had access to and hired some of earliest content creators, the layer over layer of film production quality video couldn’t fit into the narrow pipes of the broadband at the time.
So the highly anticipated internal launch of the ‘website’ stumbled worse than the Obamacare website rollout, buffering, halting, crashing and I’m not sure if the NYC bandwidth capacity ever got there before the Shooting Gallery went down in the storm of the dot com bubble, taking down a new large investor/takeover company - wait for it, a mining company from Canada - can’t make this stuff up - just was the sign and nature of the times. In the end, the content play was right on, it was just 5 years or more ahead of the technology to carry it.
We are struggling through the winter trying to get things done in one of the coldest winters - sustained cold with no breaks - that I remember in awhile. Not a ton of snow, but some very low temps and recently some snow/ice overnight making travel treacherous.
Our house up in Parksville is dancing and swerving like a good Saquin Barkley rush (I feel I’ve used that recently before) around the weather, but moving ahead and by the time spring starts to sprout, we should be well on our way to roughing in and gaining momentum. It's been such a pleasant rewarding experience working with this family. One of the hard lessons - but what lessons provide the more benefit than the hard ones - one of the hard lessons of that 2 year nonsense I went through with a bunch of morons up north is that my time and mental tools need to be allocated to productive things - not the biggest challenge, not the hardest hill to climb, not the driest row to hoe. It's the temptation of an person who is used to solving hard problems to pick the hardest to pursue - it's just in our DNA. Learning to pass that up, to leave the stress-induced dopamine surge - to let that go, that's not easy for a professional problem solver, and hand to hand combat veteran.
Went to the Eagles v. Commanders game in Philly - what was it, the NFC championship - great game, great seats, enjoyed the time with my son. We parked about 2 miles away so had a birds-eye view of the throng of celebration that was Broad Street - a crush of fans, that actually felt a little unsafe, and was the first crowd I was ever in that grew so tight I could see how if someone fell, they would have a hard time getting up. Lucas and got out of there - I'm not one for big crowds like that, especially exuberant drunk ones.
Turns out our seats in the Red Zone, c. 15 yard line, was a great place to watch the 80 point scoring game, with Barkley's first one right towards us, and many more after that.
I was in the city, parked on W. 30th around 7th Avenue, and I guess that was a vibrant fur trade at one time with lots of fun stores still there. If I lived somewhere fancy, I would have bought this jacket for sure.
Feeding the boyz, with the help of the gallon jug of local maple syrup that my bank, Jeff Bank, gifted me over the holidays.
The dinner out in the West Village was nice, and just so happened to be right in the era of my late night wonderings in 2000/2001 - in ungentrified, sticky, late night revelry in places like the White Horse Tavern, Maries Crisis Cafe and Smalls Jazz Club - all while still serving the souls of the late night. Now serving the people who have their shit together for the most part.
Kind of a wild few days - flew to St Petes, for 48 hrs, flew to Newark to pick up my car and rendezvous with my son, drive to Philly, back to Milford, for a few days then into NYC for a nice evening. My flight from EWR to Tampa at 5pm Thursday was one of those experiences where you board a plane, sit there for 45 minutes, then deplane because of some issue. Luckily, another plane was leaving in 30 minutes and I guess I was the first one to book the last seat on that one, so only delayed an hour or two.
Unit 1701 is looking good in St Pete's. Going to try and rent it for 6 or 7 months at $7k a month.
