I’ve been having an ongoing bad experience with U.S. Airways over their Dividend Miles. I’d accumulated about 15,000 miles with them and the miles were about to expire. I didn’t have any trips coming up, so I looked for a way to redeem those frequent flyer miles before they expired. U.S. Airways provided a way to subscribe to magazine and newspapers using miles — great! I signed up to get a bunch of magazines and dutifully waited the several weeks that it would take for magazines to start showing up. But instead of newspapers and magazines, I started to get little white post cards back in the mail. The first one let me know that I wouldn’t be getting The Economist:
Bummer. Then I found out that I wouldn’t be getting the Wall Street Journal:
Bigger bummer. But after a while, I started to notice a trend. See if you can tell what the trend was:
Doh!
Doh!
Doh!
Doh!
Doh!
Doh!
That’s right — not a single magazine or newpaper showed up. Instead, eight different times I was told that an “overwhelming response” meant that title wasn’t available.
So where do things stand now? Well, in the 4-10 weeks that I had to wait for the subscriptions to start, those 15,000 frequent flier miles expired. I can’t try to subscribe to any other magazines or even donate the miles to charity at this point.
To add a cherry on top, I keep getting emails from U.S. Airways, which apparently can’t understand why I would let my miles expire and would be happy to sign me up for a credit card to resurrect those miles from the dead:
You know what, U.S. Airways? Just keep the miles. Or better yet, if anyone from the U.S. Airways Dividend Miles program sees this post and wants to do something nice, please donate those miles to charity.
If you fly with U.S. Airways, be aware that redeeming miles for magazine/newspaper subscriptions might not work as well as you’d like. And will I be avoiding 321mags.com (which now redirects to magazineoutlet.com) in the future? Yes, I will be avoiding them. 
See original here:
Bad Experience with U.S. Airways Dividend Miles
I’ve decided what I want to do for August: read 15 books in 30 days. I read three books this weekend:
- The Accidental Billionaires, by Ben Mezrich.
- Gang Leader for a Day, by Sudhir Venkatesh.
- World War Z, by Max Brooks.
I enjoyed all three. Now I need your help. What books would you recommend that I read in August?
Original post:
Good books to read for Summer 2009?
MSFT and Yahoo announced their deal earlier today. I’m curious what you think–who did better in the deal?
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.
Let me know what you think.
View original here:
Who came out ahead in the Microsoft-Yahoo deal?
The overwhelming winner in my 30 day poll was “Bike to work” so that’s what I’m doing during the month of July. In the third week of July I’ll be out in Boston to speak at SIGIR, but any time I’m heading into the Googleplex during July, I’m planning to bike there.
Is there something good for yourself that you’ve been meaning to do? Why not try it for 30 days this month? The month will end whether you try something new or now, so why not tackle something new?
Here is the original:
30 day challenge begins: biking to work
I got a spam email that I thought about blogging about, but decided not to. Then they spammed me *again*. Sheesh.
So here goes. If you get an email with a subject like “Affordable Link Building Outsourcing,” think twice. Any email that starts out
Make your links appear Natural
Link Building is one of the most significant aspect of the off page optimization process and is a major determinant…
is starting off on the wrong foot. The objective is not to “make your links appear natural”, the objective is that your links are natural. Another rule of thumb for me personally is to be wary of people that email or cold-call you out of the blue repeatedly. Checking my email, these “link building experts” email-spammed me back in April, too.
See original here:
Natural links are better than non-natural