Champagne Velvet

April:

• Work at Pantheon continues positively and Jim starts openly questioning my move to China, saying that there’s plenty of money to be made in New York (true) and that the company is clearly on the rise (also true).
• I have an interesting dinner with John Probandt, discussing the way he’s done business there, aspects of Chinese culture, my plans, and the possibility of working together on projects there - I recommend Del Frisco’s.
• Great first Seder at cousin Paula’s house. It’s good to get a bigger group of the family together than usual.
• Great second Seder at Jim’s house where they’re slightly more reform than we are, in a good way.
• Elsewhere,
• Peter Jennings hosts his last World News Tonight;
• Pope John Paul II dies; and
• Airbus’s superjumbo, the A380 - the largest passenger plane in the world, makes its debut test flight.

May:

• Jim continues to try to convince me not to go to China, to stay at Pantheon, and finally makes me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I will stay at Pantheon but continue to seek development and acquisition opportunities in China with trips out every two months or so… at least that is the plan.
• I see Star Wars: Episode III at a 4:40am show in Times Square - it doesn’t disappoint but by the time we’re done with breakfast at Blue Fin, I’m a few minutes late for work despite getting up at 3am. The film has a record opening day gross of $50mm.
• Ken, Jim, and I represent Pantheon at ICSC in Las Vegas - a fantastic trip, meet a ton of great people and have a great time.
• Elsewhere,
• The Downing Street Memo is first published and shown to the public - the document is an internal British government memo explaining their belief that the Bush Administration has sought a way to justify a war in Iraq to the U.S. population and the world since before it entered office;
• Lenovo acquires IBM’s PC business - the Chinese start their assault on U.S. brand names as they attempt (and succeed at) going up the profitability curve from manufacturer to design and retailing;
• North Korea fires another test missile into the Sea of Japan - a country displays a continuing weapons program but talk of war by the U.S. is extremely soft compared to that towards Iraq in 2003;
• My Miami Heat, led by Dwyane Wade, sweep the Washington Wizards and advance to the Eastern Conference Finals where they face the Detroit Pistons; with both Shaq and Wade hurt, the Pistons take the final two games of the series to advance to the NBA Finals;
• Danica Patrick races in the Indy 500 and comes in fourth after leading the race several times; and
• W. Mark Felt, former FBI agent, admits to being Deep Throat.

June:

• I start off the month with my first due diligence trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. The property looks all right but the deal doesn’t. Santa Fe was great and I look forward to going back.
• From Santa Fe, I go for a quick visit to Rancho Palos Verdes to see Chaz. He doesn’t move much, his neck is locked in place with a hard collar and he can barely move his right arm but it’s good to see him.
• The Annual Weekend of Burgers and Beer is, as usual, a success. Jon Wanderer, Chris Szczepanski, Matt Marinzoli and I go back to Matt’s house in Barnegat, NJ. [reminder not to bring more than one change of clothes next year because they’re worthless.]
• Elsewhere,
• Apple announces that it will switch to Intel CPU’s from IBM - after bluffing this move for a long time, it came as a small surprise to me and I think it will be interesting to see its effects over the coming years;
• Michael Jackson is found not guilty on all counts - and so was O.J. I have to admit we did take a break to watch on TV from work; and
• The U.S. Supreme Court decides in favor of MGM in the MGM v Grokster trial - this is bad news for innovation and innovators.

About to leave for a New Year’s weekend trip - one night in Massachusetts and two in Vermont at Sugarbush - so it’s time to reflect before the year is through. It’s been a crazy year.

January:

• Starting to formalize plans to move to China and invest in real estate with Dave Weishaus; picked out the city; started to put together the investor list, etc.
• The plan was to get everything organized while wrapping everything up at GT Advisory for a move in June.
• Elsewhere,
• The world is still trying to organize aid for the countries hit by the tsunamis of December 26, 2004 and Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush get involved;
• There is a debate over the election results in Ohio with a full investigation and report - I continue to believe that there was fraud and that it goes at least as high as Karl Rove;
• George W. pissed off the entire city of Washington, D.C., with his over-the-top second inauguration and declares that his victory says that the war in Iraq is justified - I didn’t watch;
• U.S. officials announce that the search for WMD’s has ended - and the explicit reasons for the war change;
• Apple introduces the Mac mini and the iPod Shuffle at MacWorld - I look forward to the 2006 announcements especially re: Mac mini as home theater PC and to what extent HDTV is integrated; and
• Iraq holds the countries first multi-party election in 50 years, previous single-party ballots looked like this.

February:

• Art Chang throws in a very positive curve ball by deciding it was time for him to leave which basically forced me out of a job. This was somewhat surprising as I had been assured I could stay on, but in the end it saved me from wasting three or four months of my life.
• A few days later, after discussing my ideal internship to prepare me for moving to China, Art introduces me to Jim Runsdorf and Ken Cohen at Pantheon Properties. Pantheon and the opportunity fit the ideal: a small development firm where I could get involved in the entire deal process from sourcing to close to asset/property management and everything in between.
• I leave GT Advisory and begin at Pantheon on February 15th.
• I grew up asking my dad, a commercial and industrial broker, all kinds of questions about the real estate business never thinking I would be working in the industry. Based on that small platform, my somewhat-more-formal education in the business was exponential.
• The work environment is comfortable while encouraging ambition. If you get stressed out, there’s a hatchet and some wood to take it out on; there’s the terrace for an outdoor meeting or late afternoon drink. It’s a tight-knit group and a great place to be.
• Elsewhere,
• The New England Patriots win Super Bowl XXXIX over the Philadelphia Eagles with a hurt Terrell Owens (who played very well) and a “sick” Donovan McNabb (who didn’t);
• The Michael Jackson child molestation trial begins - my interest is minimal except that the parents letting their kids spend the night at Neverland are crazy;
• Carly Fiorina resigns as Chairman and CEO of HP;
• The US balance of trade deficit exceeds the previous record by 25%, even as the dollar continues to strengthen as the market views interest rate spreads as more important than other fundamentals; and
• Gary Bettman announces the cancellation of the NHL season which I can’t say I regret.

March:
• My plans for China continue as does my real estate education.
• Zhenning Guo gets involved in the China partnership.
• We start to finalize Pantheon’s acquisition of our parking lot in the Bronx.
• I go to the ACC tournament in Washington, D.C. with Amnon Meiri. Great trip, great basketball, just a shame that Duke won.
• Elsewhere,
• China started human testing on an AIDS vaccine;
• US Rep Henry Waxman accuses the Bush administration of withholding an audit on Halliburton until after the election (but is anyone surprised?);
• In what I believe will become THE biggest focus of attention (over oil, gold, foodstock, or anything else) over the next 50 years, NGO’s meet at the 3rd Annual Alternative World Water Forum and decry water privitization;
• MGM Studios v Grokster goes to the US Supreme Court;
• Terry Schiavo dies, which I think is a good thing no matter how crazy her husband was; and
• Doctors implant a microchip into a paralysed man’s brain - the chip “reads his thoughts” and allows him to “think his TV on and off, change channels” and more - the line between humans and androids continues to blur and society seems to accept it, as I do for the most part.

20 Amazing Facts About Voting In The United States
By Bob Rowe

This is the stuff revolutions are made of.

Fear destroys what bin Laden could not - Robert Steinback

If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden’s attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution — and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it — I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled.

Organizing my thoughts and trying to figure out what I want to make this thing work. This is an email I sent to Zach on December 21st explaining what/where my thoughts were:

Things I want to be able to do:

• Categories
• Lists (books, movies, music, links, etc.)
• Non-blog pages
• Maybe RSS (I think mostly so that I can have it on my individualized Google page so that it will remind me to post)
• Would love to be able to use a toolbar to highlight text on a page and automatically blog it with the link the way you can with blogger. I know WordPress can use the blogger API but I’m not sure if you can do this. Any ideas?
• Get rid of comment spam
• Stat tracking – click throughs, page visits, etc.
• I’m sure I’m missing some stuff but that’s basically where it starts.

As a programmer, I don’t think I want to be locked into one of the hosted solutions, with blogger being the obvious choice. I’d also like to be able to easily throw up non-blog pages w/o it being a big deal.

Of the software packages, I’m heavily leaning towards WordPress right now – flexibility, ease of setup and open source all key.

I’m very comfortable in a unix/linux environment and have practically zero experience with windows servers so my choice there is pretty easy. Also, I have no PHP or ASP experience right now so I’m going to be learning one either way. This is also a reason not to pick WordPress (coded in PHP) but I’ll learn.

The WYSIWYG packages and “you don’t need to ever touch the code” stuff doesn’t really entice me even though I don’t see myself doing a lot of coding for a while.

MT is enticing and I have a feeling that I would have chosen it had I started two years ago or so. I didn’t research the project enough to know everything that’s going on with it right now but it looks like the free version is no longer being updated and it’s not open source. I also read that it can be more difficult to setup.

As far as hosting goes, I’m looking at the most basic plans on DreamHost and MediaTemple but haven’t gotten tremendously far in that research. GoDaddy somewhat scares me. Shared hosting is obviously more than fine with me.

Since then, Performancing released their fantastic Firefox extension which solves the “blogger API” / toolbar problem discussed above and I settled on DreamHost and WordPress. One holdup was that I decided to wait for the WordPress 2.0 release to avoid any upgrade issues since it was only a couple days away anyway. So far so good…