CVG, 61.

Lame!

It used to be that for flights less than 500 miles, you still got 500 miles of credit. Now they are getting all stingy with frequent flier miles. So if you fly from New York to Boston, you only get a couple hundred points. 500 points is barely worth anything, but to cut it even more? Lame.

Now I’ve plotted this: http://tinyurl.com/3d6uwb

This is a drive from Fairbanks, Alaska to Key West, Florida. Then to San Diego, California, and back over to Labrador City, Quebec. Then back to Fairbanks. Repeat this sequence about 6 times. And check “Avoid Highways”.

The result is over 108,000 miles (~4x circumference of the earth), and would take 110 consecutive days of driving without stopping. If you drove 8 hours a day, it would take you almost a year. The Google Maps directions include 5,022 steps (And you wind up back at Fairbanks city hall).
I’ll be the first to acknowledge I could have made an even longer trip by just going back and forth between Fairbanks and Key West. I could have made a more interesting pattern by making tight zig zags across north america. So this is kinda in between.

I still wonder what the longest possible Google Maps trip is. If they allowed you to plot a drive on the Pan American Highway, THEN we’d be talking some serious mileage.

In case you feel like driving for a month without stopping.

While I normally go to lengths to avoid forfeiting my frequent flier miles, I take a certain amount of satisfaction in having cashed out my miles such that I had only 38 left. I also enjoy having divested myself of US Airways.

I stared at this picture for a good minute and a half, with its caption “The End” before I realized that it was Fidel Castro and not Willie Nelson.

So yes, Willie Nelson is still alive.

Today a colleague and I ventured down to 24th and 7th for lunch to enjoy the now-famous “Col-Pop” offering from BBQ Chicken. It’s actually more of a proper restaurant than I thought it would be. They also serve beer, and apparently are quite a hip Chelsea nightspot.

The waitress told us that they used to sell maybe one Col-Pop every two weeks. Since the blogs got wind of it, though, they’ve been selling 5 of them per day.

Behold:

The following is the description for an N95 Game called System Rush:

You take the role of a computer hacker bent on shutting down the networks responsible for the planet wide information "lock down".