I am currently an employee of Google. I receive a salary from them and I also own Google stock and options.

Other than compensation from Google, I don’t accept any money or other gifts of value from any companies or individuals. I don’t accept speaking fees, consulting fees, honoraria, or trips. I don’t accept free, discounted, or loaned products. When I receive unsolicited gifts of value from companies or individuals in the scope of work, I give away those gifts.

When I speak at a conference or event, I generally do not pay a registration fee for that event. Some conferences also waive registration fees for that event for one or more of my colleagues or a traveling companion. Either my company or I pay my own travel and hotel expenses when I speak at an event.

I do not run advertisements or otherwise receive any monetary compensation from the operation of my website.

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.

Update: Some new developments have happened since I wrote this blog post. US Airways wrote the day after I blogged to apologize for a bad experience, said that they’d investigate what happened, and then they reinstated the miles. That’s about as much as I could ask for, and I appreciate their response. I donated the miles to charity.

A couple days later, the vendor for the “Magazines for Miles” program contacted me. They said that when they verified the zip code for the magazines with the zip code on file with the airline, it didn’t match, so the order was sent to the airline for verification. When US Airways confirmed my address, the vendor re-processed the order. But then by the time the order reached US Airways for decrementing, the miles had already expired, so the order was cancelled. Due to a different glitch, the cancellation notice implied that the magazine inventory wasn’t available. The magazine vendor offered to send the magazines now, but I declined. I’d already donated the miles to charity and that’s enough to resolve the situation in my mind.

As a software engineer, I can easily imagine this happening. I guess the takeaway as a flier would be to use your miles before they get too close to expiring.

This month is really busy with some internal Google projects–don’t worry, not related to webspam–so I’m not planning to do a new 30 day challenge this month. I have kept biking in to work and I’m enjoying it more lately. I think I’ll enjoy biking even more after I bling my bike out with the full-color LED lights I bought from MonkeyLectric at Maker Faire. Here’s an image from MonkeyLectric’s gallery to show you what they look like:

I have to say, they’re a big step up from my Tireflys, which are just LEDs that stick on the stem valve of your bike tire.

For the month of June, I tried to walk 10,000 steps a day. I learned that a walk in the evening is a nice way to wind down and relax.

For the month of July, I biked into work. I learned:
- I don’t much like to bike to work. Part of it is probably that I have pretty old/crappy bike that doesn’t change gears quite right. The fastest path to work is on car-dense road, which also isn’t much fun.
- For the iPhone, I found a program for $3 called MotionX-GPS that does a very solid job of recording times and GPS tracks.
- But the best program I found was for Android. It’s called My Tracks and it’s free. It’s better than MotionX-GPS for a couple reasons. First, in addition to “total time,” the My Tracks application also tracks “moving time.” In other words, if you’re stuck at a traffic light, your “total time” keeps counting but your “moving time” doesn’t. Second, the My Tracks application can easily upload your GPS track to a Google Map.
- I can tell a notable improvement in my fitness level. It’s deeply satisfying to shave a few seconds off my biking time every day.
- The easiest way to improve your speed is to ensure that your bike tires are fully inflated.
- I get hungrier when I bike to work. I can also eat more without gaining much weight.
- Google has a program that lets bike-to-workers earn donations for their favorite charity.

After biking to work for July, I ended up doing a short sprint triathlon (swim 400 yards, bike 11 miles, run 3 miles) this past weekend. I did it in about an hour and 20 minutes, which I’m pretty happy with–especially with my crappy bike.

For the month of August, I’m shooting to read 15 books in 30 days. I’ve only read 6-7 books so far, so I’m behind, but I figure I’ll read 15 books and if that takes a little while longer, no biggie. I love to read.

So I need some good workout music, because my current tunes are getting tired. What songs get you pumped up when you’re exercising? Here’s some tunes that work for me:
- Blink 182
- music from the Mortal Kombat soundtrack (hey, don’t mock it until you try it!)
- “Ready Steady Go” by The Meices
- The Mountain Goats
- Foo Fighters
- The Killers
- sometimes the Pixies or the Ramones

How about you? What workout music goes into your playlist mix and gets you ready to exercise?

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 not, so why not tackle something new?

I’m just now wrapping up an effort to not watch any television for 30 days. I started on May 22nd (right after all the season finales finished). I learned that other than a few times at night, I don’t really miss the television–and I ended up reading a lot more books. I’ll still watch some TV after this experiment, but I think I’ll watch less. I also noticed when I watched TV after a month off that when a pizza commercial came on, I started to hanker for pizza. Search ads have wonderful, trackable ROI–but branding ads can be effective too.

So now the question is: what project should I attempt next? I wrote down a few ideas ranging from hard (read 15 books in 30 days) to near-impossible (no email for 30 days). I’m curious to hear what you think I should try:

If you have other suggestions, leave them in the comments!

It looks like blog tag has come to the search bloggers. I’ve been tagged by so many people that I yield and surrender obscure facts about me.

1. When I was growing up in Eastern Kentucky, there wasn’t always a lot to do. In high school, we once played Car Tag. In real tag, you chase people around until you can catch them. Car tag is played the same way. In order to win, you have to touch your car to the other person’s car. As I recall, I won at car tag. Please do not try this at home. Now we have things like the web to avoid boredom.
2. My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair ZX81 that my Dad assembled from a kit. When we maxed out the 2K memory, he bought us a 16K expansion module. My second computer was a Commodore 64. I was a Commodore fan long after it was clear that IBM PCs would dominate that decade of computing.
3. Growing up, my mother was an evangelical Christian and my father was a physics professor. As a result, I learned to have a healthy respect for people with different opinions and perspectives.
4. In my freshman year of college, I was the eight-ball champion for my dorm. There was another guy who was better than me, but he had bad luck in the final game. On a good day at Google, I could sometimes beat Google Fellow Jeff Dean, who is a sharp guy with a pool cue. Now I haven’t played in years, so I probably suck big rocks at pool. Huh, Danny likes billiards too. Danny, we’re clearly just going to go a bowling/pool frenzy when you make it back to the valley.
5. One of my cats, Emmy, likes nooks and crannies. Her favorite is curling up in a box or bag:

Note: Back in 2006 I was going to tag a few people, e.g. Jim Allchin, but Allchin has left Microsoft and probably has better things to do now. That’s the hazards of doing blog posts ~3 years too late!