Yesterday I did something that I would have never thought I would do. I rode around in various airplanes just for the sake of riding in airplanes—I took a “mileage run”. Mileage runs are tickets purchased for the express purpose of gaining frequent flyer miles or segments.
In my case, I needed segments. Six to be precise. I was six segments shy of making Premier Executive on United Airlines (their middle tier of frequent flyer elite membership). My wife and girls were scheduled to be out of town, so I booked a 6-segment round trip that covered 5 states in 24 hours. I left at 8:30am Saturday morning and touched down at 8:23am Sunday morning. The route that I took is below:
- Nashville to Denver
- Denver to Los Angeles
- Los Angeles to San Francisco
- San Francisco to Seattle
- Seattle to Chicago O’Hare
- Chicago to Nashville
That 5-state, 24-hour flight put me at 60 segments on United and their partners for the year. I have to go back out to San Francisco on Friday this week for a weekend full of company meetings. Having made Premier Executive will allow me to earn double miles on that trip. Between the mileage run and the weekend trip, I’ll earn over 18,000 miles in the space of a week.
I booked the mileage run through CheapTickets.com for less than $310. Based on how many miles I earned on the trip (30% bonus because I was a current Premier level), that came out to 4.7 cents per mile. You can’t buy them outright that cheaply.
As another plus, I got to catch up on some reading and finished two 500-750 page novels that I’d been wanted to read before I got home.
It was an interesting experience. I don’t know that I would do that specific routing again, but I like flying enough that I would definitely consider another run to keep my status.
I’m so pumped! I just got my registration complete for cf.Objective() in St. Paul, MN May 2-4. I also registered for the 2-day pre-conference workshop. I’ve been doing some basic work with Mach II over the last few months but want to get some in-depth knowledge of how to (correctly) build larger applications.
There are going to be dozens of the “CF Heavyweights” either speaking, sponsoring or attending the conference and I can’t wait!
Thanks to a late afternoon winter storm yesterday, I am spending the weekend in Chantilly, VA. I was due to go home yesterday (and really looking forward to it too!) but the storm cancelled most of the flights out of Dulles and I was told they couldn’t get me back to Nashville until Sunday. Since I had to be back up here Monday, it didn’t make sense to do that, so I’m just not going home this weekend.
The bad part about the situation (which my lovely wife is in the process of fixing as I write this) is that my shiny new Macbook Pro was delivered to my house on Thursday. Sooo…I’ll have to wait a couple more days before I can get my hands on it. She is shipping it up here to the office so hopefully I’ll have it sometime Monday and can start setting it up. I have to give my current Dell laptop to my cousin on Wednesday night next week so it’ll be a horse race to try to get ColdFusion, CFEclipse, MySQL etc all set up and working correctly by then.
Anyway, “every cloud has a silver lining” they say. This one is that my schedule for this weekend just got cleared so I’m going to try to make some headway on some side work I have pending.
Tim Buntel asked for feedback a few days ago on the “attributes” of people that develop using ColdFusion. There have been a lot of replies to his blog entry as well as some entries on other developer’s blogs answering it as well (Mark Drew and Sean Corfield to name two). To keep the trend going (or maybe be a copy-cat, who knows), I’ve put my version of that personna below.
- 35 years old
- Married with 3 children (twin girls: 9 yrs, boy: 11 mos)
- Drive a 2005 Nissan Maxima
- Own our home on 2 acres about 50 miles south of Nashville, TN. Decorations (sometimes to my wife’s chagrin) include many University of Kentucky Wildcats items
- Always been a “Windows-head” but lately am increasingly considering switching to a Macbook Pro as I don’t ever want to go to Windows Vista
- No idea who’s nominated for what award. Think award shows are a waste of time. Travels every week for work and have no time for those kinds of shows
- Addicted to NCIS, 24, The Unit, StarGate SG1, StarGate Atlantis and Battlestar Gallactica
- Not much of an outdoor person, but enjoy riding street bikes (own a 1995 Yamaha FZR-600) even though I don’t have much time to ride it these days
- Music: Total “Metal-Head” but starting to lean toward some of the newer country music lately. Enjoy good jazz every now and then
There you have “me in a nutshell” (for all 3 of you that actually read this stuff!). Have a good weekend…I’m off to the airport to start my weekly journey home.
Adobe MAX officially began today–sadly without me this year. This year marks only the second time since I started going to the event (then called DevCon) in 2000. Alas, having recently become completely self-employed, I couldn’t justify taking a week without pay at this point.
Ben Forta posted an entry to his blog yesterday saying that the opening keynote for this morning was to be awe-inspiring so hopefully Adobe or someone will release that video to those of us who couldn’t make the trip this year.
One of the things that I’m really going to miss by not getting to go is catching up with all the folks I’ve gotten to know over the last (nearly) 7 years that I’ve been doing ColdFusion work. It’s always neat to see folks that you used to work with and are now in different positions as well as those you see at these conferences year after year.
