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| Fly awaaaaaay! From the “Life is Awesome” link below! |
ON MY MIND
I updated the post from yesterday to explain how I got to be driving a new Mercedes for 6 months for free AND get paid $200 cash. While you are all awaiting for MrPickles to reveal some free car rental code I will be long gone…this baby drives so sweet! All friends are in awe of me…heck, I am in awe of me:-) This was my biggest score for sure. I will look so awesome driving to CVS stores with it lol.
About three weeks left to end the tax madness, I am in great shape. Wife starting a job at Ford this Wednesday which will lead to a new routine with me now taking over all kid driving duties as her commute will go from 6 minutes to about 40 minutes. I am ready…I think.
One of these days I will do an About Me page and move to WordPress. I have been saying this for months…
The MyVanillaDebit website has been mostly down this weekend. Not good…
MILES/POINTS
Should You Start Your Own Blog? From PointChaser. Good post & some good comments. I hope the post scares new bloggers because I am going insane trying to keep up with so many blogs already. Thank you!
Secrets to getting airline, hotel elite status faster. From Joe Brancattelli at Seat 2B. Pretty good article with elite status match information in one place. Did you know you can get Gold Status at Club Carlson if you owned 200 shares Rezidor Hotels (symbol:REZIF). I try to keep up with everything…I must admit that I did NOT know that! This does NOT constitute investment advice…NO WAY!!!
Chris Elliott is at it again! “Why loyalty programs are dead – and why that’s good news for almost everyone“. Again taking it ridiculously too far. The value proposition is sure changing and not for the better. When there is no value in these programs TBB would retire from the game/hunt/addiction/obsession/lunacy:-)
TRAVEL
The Island of the Gods. Amazing video of Bali, wow. From MatadorNetwork.
Reflections of the Irony of the Berlin Wall. From Pointsandtravel. I was here in 1986 and I still remember it like it was yesterday. I got close to the gate at Checkpoint Charlie and the East German guards yelled at me. I was teased that I was lucky I did not get shot.
Grand Tour of Asia: The Ultimate Insider’s Guide. From Conde Nast Traveler. This is cool!
ODDZ & ENDZ
Life is Awesome. From the Chive. Awesome pics, guaranteed to lift your spirit and make you high without chemical substances involved! Mostly travel pics, Awesome indeed!
Elliott “anti-Flyertalk” crusade is both right and very wrong. For casual travellers, they’re probably not going to get anything worthwhile by simply taking a flight or staying in a hotel room. To benefit from loyalty programs, you HAVE TO PLAY THE GAME. I’ve been playing the game for more than 25 years and, honestly, the rewards have never been better. But the game changes and you have to adapt. Right now, the game is most lucrative with financial instruments, not “butt in seat” miles or “butt in bed” points.
The rewards have never been better and redeemed with ever higher miles/points required:-) I agree, you have to play the game, absolutely no argument there! And the big bang is in financial instruments yes…
Man, the spammers are really owning you.
The biggest question surround whether or not you should start a blog is:
1. How well would you handle deleting new spam comments every 47 seconds?
Yeah it is just insane!!!! I can’t keep up with these phuckers!!!!
In WordPress, Aksimet stop literally 99.99 per cent of spam, very impressive bit of software. I literally delete over 1,000 spam posts a week from my spambox and less than 1 comment per week makes it through.
I am moving to WordPress in the near future. I hear that is it a lot worse over in WordPress! Is this Aksimet free? I am just sick and tired of deleting spam crap in very busy days like today!
Akismet is free for personal blogs.
I’ve been using WordPress for several years. Akismet, Antispam Bee, Bad Behavior and some other plugins are what I use to block spam.
Dealing with automated spam is relatively simple. Programmers have created plugins to detect and block it. The human spammers can be a major pain. It’s really a constant cat-and-mouse game.
Thanks. I noticed an increase in spam comments that come through…what a royal pain wasting my time to delete them!
Get in line, groupie!
Ok:-)
As I was reading Elliott’s triumphant post, I was at LAX, waiting to come home. Because I’m gold on UA, I can now buy the cheapest ticket within a 48-hour window and then SDC to my preferred flight home for free. It requires a bit of planning and logistics, but it saved me $150 out-of-pocket just on this single trip (over the cheapest fare of any airline at times that worked for me). I’ll also barely make gold again this year, using creative routings eased by having status (e.g., econ+ seats and SDC-ing to longer or more flights.) I would point this out to Chris as a benefit of a loyalty program, but he would likely reply that my techniques are far too difficult for his readers. He is partially right; his fans, correspondents, and “underwriters” seem to be a few bulbs short of a chandelier.
harvson3
The guy’s rants make mine look like child’s play:-)
harvson has his own fans too 🙂
groupies!
Thanks a lot for posting the Grand Tour of Asia! I am taking my first trip to Asia ever this December and am heading to Singapore, Thailand and Tokyo; all three of these were, of course, covered in the Conde Nast article.
Bali… sometime in the future.
Great, enjoy it!
Thanks, as always for the mention about the #Berlin wall. You need to go back and see how it looks now…