YouTube Insights: Hot Spots

A glimpse at one of YouTube’s analytics tools.
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Fly for Free on Airline Credit Cards

I’d like to provide a quick overview of a method I’ve used to accumulate a ton of bonus airline miles. For most of my financial life, I’ve used Citi’s Platinum Dividend Select, a cash-back rewards card. However, I recently stumbled upon this great post at Chris Guillebeau’s Art of Nonconformity blog. Here’s the punchline: Bonus miles earned by opening frequent flier airline credit cards. On to the facts…

Objective: Quickly accumulate airline miles to get free airfare.

What I Did:

• Opened Delta Gold AMEX card, received 30,000 bonus miles after spending $1,000 with the card. Annual fee waived for first year.
• Opened Citi Premier Pass Elite card (Expedia), received 20,000 bonus miles after spending $600 with the card. Annual fee of $75 charged.
• Opened Chase British Airways card, expecting to receive 100,000 miles after spending $2,000. Annual fee of $95 charged.

Total Credit Access: $30,000
Total Bonus Miles: 150,000

Coach class round-trips to Europe are about 50,000 miles, so that’s THREE FREE ROUND-TRIPS TO EUROPE!

My credit score dipped from 830 to 760 and is now slowly creeping back up. The average age of my accounts has decreased, but my credit utilization rate is now much lower as well, which will give me a better score as my accounts age. A few weeks of free score monitoring is available from FICO.

The British Airways 100k bonus is a fantastic offer. Next on my list is Citi’s American Airlines card which comes with 25k miles. If you own a small business, you can sometimes open two of each card and double your mileage bonus; that’s one card for you and one for your business. I don’t recommend the Citi Premier Pass Elite card; the rewards are cashed in via Expedia, and there seem to be a number of restrictions on what you can earn miles on, a lower miles-to-cash-value redemption rate, and fewer redemption options.

If you don’t regularly have enough expenses to reach these spending requirements, you can search the web for other spending strategies.

“Innovation is the Greatest Ponzi Scheme of All Time”

This is a rough sketch of an idea given to me by Sander van der Leeuw’s talk titled “The Archaeology of Innovation” which he recently gave at the The Long Now Foundation seminar series about long-term thinking. Surely need to develop this idea further.

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Auto Update – U.S. SAAR October, November 2009

11/4/2009 — An update from Autodata Corp. — In October, 838,052 cars and light trucks were sold in the U.S., for a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 10.46 million units. Over the past decade, the auto industry enjoyed annual sales of about 17 million units, but times have changed. General Motors is now making business decisions with the assumption that 10 million units will be the new “normal” annual rate for a while.

12/6/2009 — An update from Autodata Corp. — November numbers are now available. The SAAR for November 2009 was 10.93 million vehicles.

Low Car Diet: Part 2 – Day to Day

ZipCar is proving to be quite awesome. We are constantly bombarded with useless new products and services, but here is one that actually adds value to my life. Imagine that.

This past two weeks, I’ve used:

• a Prius to get groceries and dinner
• a Civic to check out an apartment in SF
• a 328i to check out an apartment in SF and visit Golden Gate Park
• a Nissan Versa to get groceries and go up to Mount Diablo to check for some of this week’s meteor shower action
• a Honda Odyssey to move from Berkeley to a new apartment in SF
• a Mini to get back over to Oakland for a Saturday homebrew BBQ

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Guy Kawasaki + Wordle: Let’s Get Specific

What has Guy blogged about in the past two weeks? (April 14 – April 27)

Wordle grabs his last five posts from his RSS feed, and with some help from Excel, we can create some more tailored views of His Wordliness. Guy, I tried following you on Twitter but your stream is so voluminous that I couldn’t see my other dear friends!

Proper Nouns

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Visualizations of Time

Via Infosthetics I found a collection of (mostly hand-drawn) visualizations of time at Icastic.com. This is a fascinating collection. I’m curious to measure how often cyclical, waveform, or interval shapes appear. This is one of my favorites.

Green Tea Dessert

Just wanted to document this moment of taste bud revelry in my life. A restaurant called Blowfish, on a street called Santana Way, in a town called San Jose. And, I wouldn’t recommend going back, because Santana Way was home to pretentious valley frat boys. Delicious, though.

Studs Terkel’s Interviews about Death

I found a fun book recently… Studs Terkel’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken? He interviewed a number of famous and infamous Chicago characters. I’m rather young, and Studs is a wonderful old historian, so I was thrilled to see some folks that I know–Ira Glass and Kurt Vonnegut. But who is Kid Pharaoh?

(be sure to click CONTINUED and then click one of the images)

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Maturity / Fun