Disclaimer: I don’t work for CVS or Vanilla Reload/Incomm, nor do I actually know what I’m talking about. But I can read, and I’ve talked to a couple of friends who have experience with BSA/AML requirements, so I think I can make some educated guesses. The other day at CVS, the person in front of…
While I know that this article is supposed to be humorous, I found the NYTimes article “How Many Miles Do I Need to Murder the Head of the Airline?” by Joyce Wadler to be more misguided than anything else. So many people feel like their miles are worthless–or worse, don’t even collect their miles–because they’re misinformed….
Links to stories one and two. When my sister and I were in South Africa, wherever we would go, people would tell us that they liked our accents. Seeing as how we were both born in the US and speak without a regional accent, neither of us could figure out why so many people were…
Since every other travel blogger has posted multiple times about this, I might as well throw my hat in the ring as well, but I’m not going to talk/speculate about the devaluation itself so much as write about things tangential to the devaluation. 1. So many blogs posted about the supposed devaluation, which I guess…
I’ve written before about my dilemma on whether or not I should mileage run for American Airlines Executive Platinum status, and I pretty much concluded that it’s not really rational for me to do so. I would be booking incremental (i.e. not already planned/largely unnecessary) trips to get the status, and since I don’t have…
This is story #2 in a series about my experiences traveling as an Asian male. You can find story #1 here. In Athens, my friends and I went to the Central Market, which had lots of things that you might not normally find in a US market, like lamb testicles. While walking around, lots of…
One of the most thought-provoking posts on Gary’s blog View from the Wing considers a question that Gary got from an African American woman at the World Domination Summit after discussing some of his techniques for maximizing his travel experiences: “these sound like great techniques; can you talk about how well they work if you…
I am not a fan of tipping. I’ll go into some of my pet peeves around the practice, but I heartily recommend a much more reliable source: a series of blog posts from a restaurant owner who had two restaurants–one with a flat service charge and one with tips–and his thoughts on how tipping led…
Writing this blog is a labor of love: it’s a lot of work to post regularly, and I don’t really make any money from it (if only I had enough traffic to pimp credit cards…). But one thing I’ve enjoyed is looking at the search terms that direct people to my blog. Many of them…
I generally dislike Verizon’s current commercials, but the commercial about infinity has to be my least favorite, largely because it implies things that are mathematically wrong. In the commercial, the man asks the kids, “what’s the largest number you can think of?” The commercial is of course a bit tongue-in-cheek, with one child answering “10”,…
