Hotel Elite Status

I travel a lot for my job (I am after all an International man of mystery ), and since I stay in hotels about 150 nights a year, I figure I should get the most out of it that I can.

When I first started this travelling job two years ago, I was a little naive about how it all worked.  I would simply use a travel site like Expedia.com or Hotels.com (who I think are owned by the same company), and find something affordable and within the budget my company considers 'reasonable.'

Hotels.com have a rewards program that gives you one free night for every ten nights you stay, and Expedia have a new program that from what I can tell absolutely blows.  The other reality of using these kinds of web sites is that generally the rates are about the same as booking direct with the hotel, and because Expedia and sites like them charge a commission to the hotel, the hotel treats you like garbage when you arrive and puts you in their cheapest nastiest room, and refuses to give you any loyalty points.

So I learned pretty quickly that it was better to choose a chain and stick with it, and for me that chain was IHG.  This group includes Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Crowne Plaza, and a few others that are less common, or more geared towards extended stay; which I avoid like the plague.

This chain has a great network of hotels, and pretty much every town I ever visit has a property with a few minutes of the place I need to be.  Despite staying at dozens of hotels, I've only found three individual properties that I disliked and refused to stay in.  One wasn't bad, but was just run down.  One was by the sea, and smelt as if it was rotting like an old wooden ship.  And the other was an extended stay that smelt of feet and despair.

Other than those unfortunate examples I've found the properties to be pretty reasonable.  Ranging in price from $80-$130 depending on location.  The rooms are very consistent, so you are rarely if ever surprised by the room.  It always has a refrigerator and microwave.  Usually a table to sit at, a desk to work at, a bed of course, and a reasonable bath with shower.  I rarely eat in this kind of hotel, so I'm not going to get into describing the food.  But generally the Holiday Inn Express has a selection of simple basic food for breakfast.  The Holiday Inn usually has a restaurant, so breakfast there can vary tremendously depending on property.

As well as the consistency and convenient locations, I enjoy the hotel's loyalty program known as Priority Club.  You get 10 points for every dollar you spend, and once you earn Platinum Elite status you get a 50% bonus on your points each night.  Priority Club also have amazing promotions, frequently offing double points, or specific bonus points for visiting certain hotels.

The promotion they had in the last quarter of 2011 was so good it yielded 58,500 bonus points for me in January of 2012, which combined with a few stays jumped me right to Platinum Elite Status through 2013.  Woohoo!

I probably would have continued to use their properties on an ongoing basis, but an incident happened at one hotel during a rare air conditioner servicing where some kind of allergen got into the room and gave me severe allergies for a whole day.  (Don't worry, I was well compensated for this!)  As I spent the day in a rival hotel being annoyed at my runny eyes and nose, I began to consider trying out another chain.

The problem with just simply trying another chain is that you have to start at the bottom of the ladder when it comes to all the perks of top elite status.  No more free upgrades to suites, no more free drinks or food, no more bonus points.  Or so I thought.

Seems like the sneaky hotels have realized that they have to offer an incentive to win over rival loyal customers, and they do, but it's all hush hush under the table and behind closed doors.  I stumbled across a web forum for people who like to discuss hotel points and air miles and found out a little secret that was quite interesting for someone in my position.

Status Match

In the price range I stay my choices really boil down to Marriott, IHG, and Hilton.  There are others, but they are not common enough to find in all the places I need to travel.  And there are others that are aimed at a cheaper market and therefore many of them suck.  And of course there are those aimed at people who do my bosses job who have the ability to spend far more at hotels.

When it comes to Hilton properties, the sub brand that most closely meets my needs in terms of price and locations would be Hampton Inn.  And frankly, I hate the logo, and the look of them from the outside.  They just put me off.  They are not that bad inside, but nothing to get excited about.

Marriott on the other hand have their regular Marriott brand, Courtyard, and Fairfield, all of which can, depending on location, fall into my travel budget.

So after a little research I found out you can simply email Marriott and ask them for a status match.  They review your elite status with another rival chain and offer you what they call a 'challenge.'  In my case because I want their top status (which normally takes 75 paid nights to obtain), they told me I must stay 18 nights in 90 days, and if I do that not only would they give me Platinum Elite status for the 90 days, but I would earn it for the rest of the year if I successfully completed the challenge.  On the down side, if you miss the challenge even by a single night you are downgraded back to your original status, and you can only apply for one challenge per year.  So if you are going to take a challenge, you might want to be careful of when you begin the challenge.

Sure enough I opened a new Marriott Rewards account (I had previous just used my wife's because I used Marriott so rarely it seemed pointless to have my own) and within 48 hours they had upgraded me from member to Platinum Elite.

So now when I visit a Marriott property I get the free room upgrades, the free stuff they give Platinum members and a general ass kissing on check in.  More importantly I now earn free nights in their hotels more quickly and get to stay in a nicer room, which when you travel is a big plus.

Time will tell how I like Marriott compared to Holiday Inn.  But so far so good.  Because Platinum Elite is generally much harder to earn than Priority Club, they seem to treat it a bit more seriously and provide more perks.  And although the rewards don't seem as generous as Priority Club, having a decent number of points at two chains will radically open up my travel options when I travel for free on my own time.

And speaking of points, consider too that the best value for them seems to be spending them on free hotel nights.  Priority Club was recently offering $100 in Amazon.com gift cards for around 31,000 points.  Which is pretty awesome.  But for 35,000 points you could have a night at the Crowne Plaza in Time Square NYC, worth $400.  So spending the points on non-hotel items may not be the best use of them.

I'm not going to dump Holiday Inn, they've been a good chain, and I have some favorite properties that are so convenient and new that I will still use those.  For now though everything else will be Marriott until I complete my 'challenge.'  Then I'll let you know how it went.

Mitt Romney Tax Information - At Last

I've not been watching the Republican debates, because frankly I'd rather stab myself in the face, and because if I want to know what happened in them I can just watch the news where they will regurgitate the main points over and over ad nauseum for 24-48 hours after each debate.

However, I was aware of the issue where Mitt Romney acted shady about his taxes for a while and then made a quip about not earning much from his speaking engagements (over $350,000 a year if you're interested).

Well bowing to pressure from his opponent Newt Gingrich he apparently released his tax information today.  While he pays a healthy dollar amount on his vast fortune as his critics suspected his tax percentage is lower than many middle class Americans.

Rather than pay 35% tax, he pays closer to 15% and has money 'invested' in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland, which he assures us is NOT a tax shelter.

But more disturbing than his $200+ million dollar fortune, his insane income of $42m a year, for me was the fact that per Mormon tradition he pays some 15% of his income to the Mormon cult church.  Yep, that's right, a guy who wants to have his finger on the nukes, and become leader of the free world, is so besotted with the cult leaders at his 'church' he gave them $7m between 2010 and 2011.

I'm all for religious freedom.  But when you feel compelled to give SEVEN MILLION DOLLARS to the church every couple of years, you have to wonder what kind of control they have over this man.  What decisions would they be guiding him in if he, Joseph Smith forbid, becomes president?

Romney has already shown himself to be a slick salesman.  He tells people exactly what they want to hear, moving his position with the changing wind of public opinion.  I for one don't believe a word out of his smarmy mouth, and I certainly don't trust anyone who feels the need to continually send millions of dollars to their church.

The last President would keep telling us that God had told him what to do.  And that was bad enough.  But what's going to happen when Mormon elders are dictating our path to their obedient servant and donor?  Pretty scary stuff.

Oh, and for those of you who don't think the Mormon Cult is in fact a cult, consider the opinion of hundreds of ex-Mormons who keep a great recovery site for those who escape the cult here.

Happy New Year 2012

2012 has already started well with the news that some of the scary bat-shit crazy presidential candidates have been forced to drop out of the race.

First Herman Cain stepped down, after giving stupid and ignorant answers (or simply yelling 9-9-9 - which rather aptly in the UK is the emergency services number like 911 in the States).

Now after Iowa, Michelle Bachmann found out the hard way that bat shit crazy wasn't enough to make it in politics.  And I'm not just harping on because I'm a liberal, this woman was so crazy, so stupid, and such a fucking bigot, there is no place for her thinking she can run for president of the free world.  I wouldn't trust her to run a gas station.

Also good news, Rick Perry, or George W. Bush II, got slammed, polling double what Bachmann managed; a measly 10% of the vote.  While he pledges to continue the fight, it's only a matter of time before that dumbass is kicked out of the race.

We've still got a VERY scary field out there, Mitt Romney; the cult member who will say anything or adopt any policy to get elected, and another bigot in the shape of Rick Santorum.

Since he came within 8 votes of beating Romney, I thought I'd share some of his world views:

1. Says he will annul all same sex marriages since gay marriage 'destabilizes' a society.
2. Says he will repeal all funding for birth control, and even allow states to ban the sale of birth control.
3. Says he will reinstate don't ask don't tell, and then made a bunch of homophobic statements about gay people in the military.
4. Claimed that because obesity rates are high in America, we should do away with food stamps.
5. Claimed that his child, who was born with a serious medical condition, would have died under socialized medicine.  Odd then that our infant mortality figures are in the gutter given how great our system is.
6. Back in August he said that poor people who 'whine' about affording health care should cut back on 'luxuries' like having a car or phone.
7. He sided with insurance companies who believe in charging more or denying coverage to people with 'pre-existing conditions.'

It scares me that some radical asshole like this can actually have a real chance at running for President.

I guess it's going to be an interesting and scary year.

CashForSmartPhones.com Review

I recently admitted that I am now Apple's Bitch.  There's no denying it.  I have decided to simply buy every new phone Apple make after my horrible AT&T / Android experience.  But this leads to a problem, because of the business model of cell phones these days, specifically smart phones, early upgrades tend to cost a lot more money than the price they advertise on TV.  And we all know why, and it's no big deal.  So what to do with the old phone?

I found a web site called CashForSmartPhones.com (part of the Cash4Laptops.com company) and they seemed to have a very reasonable sales pitch, credible reviews, and decent ratings.  You type in the smart phone you have and they give you a quote for what they are willing to buy it for.

So I entered the Samsung Infuse 4G, and my old Apple iPhone 3GS.  They quoted me $240 for the Samsung and $80 for the iPhone.  Not bad.  So I decided to take them up on the offer and filled out my information.  Within a few days a box and shipping label arrived at my home.  All I had to do is reset my phones back to their factory settings (although this company claim to erase the data themselves upon receipt), and send them in, shipped free via UPS.

A few days later I got an email saying the devices had been inspected, I called and they offered me $220 for both units.  I accepted, they PayPal'd the money right away.  Easy money.

Now you may notice that the price they offered was lower than what they paid, and I'm fine with that.  The iPhone was old and crap, that's why I replaced it.  The case was cracked at the back, the battery was in poor shape, and I had neglected to supply the charger or cord with it.  And despite the newness of the Infuse, the case was already getting worn thanks to the cheap ass crappy materials Samsung used in the construction.

I probably could have pushed for a bit more money, or tried to sell them on eBay, but then you have to deal with random buyers, the usual eBay bullshit, fees, etc.  This was straight up an easy transaction by a company that did what they promised and gave me money for something that frankly would have been left sitting in a drawer if I hadn't found this web site.

It's always exciting to see a company doing business the right way, and really I had no complaints about this whole transaction.  The $220 they paid me easily offset the penalty for early upgrade, and when the iPhone 5 comes out, I suspect I'll be doing the same again.

Slutty Cheerleaders

A cheerleader is as American as apple pie, and for that reason few Americans seem to consider that the sport is little more than the wholesale exploitation of women and girls.

The story begins in school, when the girls are groomed for exploitation and fitted with special custom designed and fitted slut outfits.  In the past schools were okay with their girls dressing slutty because hey, it's school pride right?

But what's interesting is that some schools are now beginning to wise up to the problem, for all the wrong reasons.  Instead of noting that competitive cheer-leading is dangerous and results in some 30,000 teen injuries per year, or that the whole concept of flipping around in slutty costumes while the men play a real sport is inherently sexist, what's happening in some schools is that the uniforms are deemed so slutty that they violate the dress code.

That's what recently happened in a school in California.  The same $300 slut costumes that were mandated by the school, were deemed so utterly inappropriate that girls could face suspension for wearing them in school.

Let me break that down for you.  The school designed their slutty cheerleader costumes to be worn by teenage girls.  These costumes cost $300, and were so completely inappropriate that the girls were only allowed to wear them when cheer-leading.  If they wore them inside the school they had to cover up with sweat pants.  And if they were caught just wearing the uniform, chosen by the school, they would be disciplined.

While I hate to rail against such a deep rooted American tradition, I think it's time America took a long hard look at the slutty teen cheerleaders and ask ourselves is this is really fair and reasonable to our youth.  What kind of message do we give to young girls when we create the desire in them to cavort semi naked in slut costumes in front of hundreds or thousands of people.  But then we tell them that dressing like that during any other time of the day is slutty and will result in their punishment?

The whole concept and execution is pretty disgusting.  It's sexist exploitation of teen girls on every level and it helps breed superficial behavior and sexist gender roles.  On top of all that tens of thousands of young women are being inured; some permanently.  And for what?  Some pointless men worshiping gymnastics in a slutty costume?  Where is the educational value in that?  Why is it necessary?  Are American sports so boring that the only way to keep an audience is to have semi naked girls jiggling around?

Just seems like bullshit to me.

Love, Actually

I noticed that New Year's Eve flopped at the box office this weekend, standing as I write this on a 4.9 rating out of 10 on IMDB.

Last year's rom-com flop was (among others) Valentines Day.

The common denominator is that they are all trying to be Love Actually, albeit set at a different time of the year and with more Americans in it.

But Love Actually was an excellent movie, written by a genius comedy writer and a great cast.  It managed to tell multiple stories with a common thread in a funny and clever way that made it an instant classic.

I'm not saying that one day this movie will not be surpassed, but it takes more than putting some famous pretty people together in a room.  This type of multi story line movie requires an enormous skill to put together, compelling characters, and a good set of stories that add up to the big picture.

If you want to see a nice romantic comedy that kicks the shit out of Valentines Day and New Year's Eve this Christmas, take a look at Love Actually.

Adam Carolla Rich Rant

Recently I was unfortunately subjected to a stream of douchebaggery from Adam Carolla, mouthpiece of the jocktards and thought I'd talk about the content of his rant.

In the nine minute rant Carolla begins by reminding us that 1% of Americans pay 50% of the taxes.  He then talks about the politics of envy, entitled millennials, and then defends the status quo and uses the whole rant to pat himself on the back for working hard, getting rich, and being better than 50% of Americans who are lazy assholes.  Nice.

The obvious counter to the first 'argument' is that while it may be true that the top 1% pay a lot of tax, the deck has been so stacked in this country these days that the bottom 50% of Americans control about 2% of the wealth.  So even if we took everything they had in the world, it would still be less than a 4% tax increase on the wealthy.

He moves on to talk about envy.  He uses the example of the 'good old days' when a man would be walking down the street with his son, and they would admire the Rolls Royce driving by owned by a CEO.  Claiming that now people are taught to hate and envy the Rolls Royce driver, not admire what they have achieved.

But there is glaring difference between the mythical good old days and today.  Back then, the man walking down the street with his son, could put in an honest days work at the car factory and come home and feed his wife and family.  (We'll ignore the issue of the woman being forced into domestic servitude owing to their gender, as that's a separate issue.)  They could probably live comfortably, and the CEO was probably earning just 10-30 times more money than the worker.

In this day and age, the CEO is making millions, probably 200-400 times what the worker is making.  Well I say worker, he has probably had his job outsourced to another country, but pretending he hasn't for a second, his income will almost certainly not be enough to live off requiring another family member to work, just to make a living wage.  Even if the CEO runs the company into the ground, has to take a government bail out with our tax dollars, he'll still make millions and when he retires he'll help himself to a golden handshake of millions more out of the worker's pension scheme.  Then the company will complain they can't afford to pay for worker's 'entitlements' and 'benefits' because some asshole executive just drained the fund designed to pay for all that stuff.

The CEO will have just enjoyed ten years of Bush tax cuts, helping to create an unprecedented gap between the rich and poor.  His team of lobbyists, lawyers and accountants will have ensured that the corporation will have paid nothing in taxes.  And when Obama talks about letting the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy expire, or suggest an extra tax on private jets, he'll scream about redistribution of wealth and class warfare.

About the only thing I can partially agree with Carolla on is the sadness of the millennials.  They have indeed been raised in the bizarre world where they have to be 'validated' all the time.  We worry about about their self esteem so much we have to constantly praise them for 'trying' even when their efforts suck.

For a time my wife did some contract work for a well known online university.  Often when she handed out a low grade, she'd get this indigent email from the student who would assure her that they had 'tried hard' and 'put a lot of effort' into their assignment.  The implication being that trying hard should be rewarded, even if the end result sucked.  A pretty stupid lesson that millennials have been taught from day one.

Finally Carolla tied his bullshit together by trying to make the right wing argument that anyone who works hard and tries hard can be successful, unless they suck in which case they should just shut up and accept being a loser.

But most of this crap stems from the ego of a celebrity who believes that the millions they have earned in the entertainment industry is because they are special.  Many really buy into this fallacy that they are just so talented that they deserve what the industry has given them.  This could not be further from the truth though.  For most celebrities, there has been one salient moment when they happened to meet a person with the power to change their lives.  They may have worked hard to be in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills, but it still came down to chance.

The person who made Carolla famous might have hated tall people, or people with curly hair, or sexist assholes, or he might have gone out drinking the night before and decided to stay home.

So just because you win the fame lottery, doesn't mean you are special, or magical, or better than the person who cleans your hotel room, or loads your bags on the plane.  It just means you got lucky.

If there is one thing that annoys me it is hearing some asshole like this ranting about why he shouldn't pay any more tax, and why the poor need to get some skin in the game.  Most of the poor are working their asses off holding down two, three or more jobs down just to exist.  Don't tell me they are not working hard.  Don't give me this shit about welfare queens.

We've tried the Republican model now for a decade.  That's how long the Bush tax cuts have been in place. And what do we have to show for trickle down economics?  Hmm.  The second biggest recession in US history?  The brink of collapse for what was the largest auto maker in the world?  The major banks and insurance companies of the US getting ready to file for bankruptcy?  9% unemployment?  A massive debt and deficit?  A stagnant housing market and falling housing prices.

If the Republican concept of low taxes on the 'job creators' worked so well, where is the evidence of this plan working?  And yet ask a Republican what the answer is, and they talk about keeping the tax cuts, adding new tax cuts for corporations who are (despite paying little to no tax) 'afraid' to hire more people because of our 'high' taxes in America?  Are you fucking shitting me?

I'm sorry Adam Carolla, but your rant about the rich was just a self serving pat on the back for your fame and fortune.  Occupy Wall Street have a very reasonable point which is that government policy has allowed a tiny handful of people to become filthy rich, not pay their fair share, and take billions in government contracts and handouts.  Meanwhile other nasty Republican policies have hurt and killed ordinary hard working Americans who never got that lucky break like you did.  But I guess it serves those 'losers' right eh?

Apple Own Me

Back in June I wrote about my break with Apple bondage.  After dealing with a bunch of bullshit with Apple and AT&T I decided to try the Android option and purchased a Samsung Infuse 4G which I have been using up until the beginning of December.

Unfortunately, this was a case of the grass being greener on the other side of the fence.  AT&T helped screw the phone with their shitty network, but even the crap network doesn't excuse the dropped calls, lack of reception in my study, and several minutes the phone could take to get a GPS lock on anything.  The phone would sometimes spontaneously get hot and turn itself off.  Really nice if you were expecting a call, only to find your phone had been off for a couple of hours.

AT&T have been promising to release the newer version of the OS for the phone for some time too.  But they never did.

And at the end of the day the big screen is pointless because if you have it on full brightness the phone is going to die long before you get a chance to watch that movie or do anything else useful with it.

So it was six months of disappointments and poor functionality. Finally I was sitting in a restaurant in Orlando Florida not 20 minutes from all the famous Disney / Universal / Harry Potter stuff and I could not get a signal (at least not one that worked) and I decided it was time to try something else.

When it came down to it, I don't want to lose my AT&T unlimited family plan.  It is pretty competitive price wise.  So faced with buying another phone on their network, there really was only one choice.  The iPhone feels more solid, better built, and looks cooler than anything out there.  And reviews told me that the 4S has the best camera of any iPhone yet.

So I broke down, got me an iCloud, paid the $200 penalty for an early upgrade, purchased the sucker warranty from Apple for $90.  And presto, I now own an iPhone, while Apple owns me.

I decided to wait a little while to review it because it's easy to have a honeymoon period with new electronic gadgetry and I didn't want to gush about something I was destined to hate.

The phone itself looks and feels much like the iPhone 4 of course, which is no bad thing.  And although I've been used to a 4.5 inch display for the past six months, the sharpness and clarity of the display made it an easy transition back to the smaller display, with the added benefit of a phone that is physically nicer and easier to handle.

Here's a summary of the iPhone 4S experience:

What I love

Okay, so Siri is fun.  There's something very science fiction about being able to say, "Siri, play me a U2 song."  The voice recognition still isn't Star Trek, but it's coming along.  This is just about the most impressive AI/Voice recognition that I've ever seen, and my hat is off to Apple for going down this road.

The camera delivers as promised, and in typical Apple fashion, it just works.  There is no F Stop, no ISO, no scene, no this, no that.  Point the camera and press the button.  The camera takes fabulous pictures, despite the lack of user configuration or control.  It beats my Samsung Infuse big time, especially in low light.

The new processor is faster and anything I try and do on the phone just zips along nicely.

GPS is super fast and the most accurate of any smart phone I've used.  FourSquare is nice and quick, which is great, because I don't want to spend two minutes checking into a location.

What I like

The battery life is pretty good.  On a full charge I can do everything I want to all day, and still have plenty left when I get home.  I mean battery life being good is a relative thing on a smart phone.  Clearly it's not going to last a week, and you are going to have to charge it every night.  But it's the best smart phone I've used.

Despite the substandard AT&T network there is some kind of dual antenna in this phone that makes it work better.  So I am getting stronger and more reliable signal with this phone than I did with the iPhone 3GS or my Samsung Infuse.

Minor Grumbles

Configuration was pretty easy.  Although the usual corporate pissing match made it harder than it should have been to port my music off my Amazon cloud, my ringtones off my old phone, and my contacts off my Google contacts database.  In fact when it came to contacts I eventually gave up and simply retyped them all into the iCloud.  Then I got a sync app to pull the pictures from Facebook.  Again, I believe that if corporations played better together, this process could have been a lot simpler.

Speaking of the iCloud, again I feel like Apple have tried to over simplify it and as a result lost some of what could have been useful functionality.

Facebook has much improved their standard app, but I've still found a few minor bugs that annoy me.

In an effort to over simplify the sync process, I somehow feel like they have made it more complicated in reality.  Because I have an iPad 2 for work, iTunes was trying to push apps from that onto my iPhone in a rather annoying way.  Fact is, many of my apps for the iPad are work related, and I don't necessarily want them on my iPhone.  Similarly, just because I put it on my iPhone doesn't mean I want it transferred to my iPad.  And if I download a 4Gb movie on my iPad, I certainly may not need it downloaded again onto my work laptop.

Overall

Until the competition radically improves their product, I've just decided to stay with Apple.  The 4S is an incredible phone, and so far it does all I want it to.  Sure, some things are very Apple and you just have to accept control in these areas.

I can't say I'd recommend AT&T, they do after all come in bottom every time Consumer Reports does a survey.  But I can't in all honesty tell that I'd be any happier with Verizon.  It would take me several months comparing them side by side to know that.  I travel a lot with my job, so it's not something I'd know right away.

In the end, if you can't beat them join them.  I tried to break away, reject the evil corporate BS of Apple, but I wasn't prepared to accept the price I had to pay in terms of lost features and functionality.

I found one of those websites where you can sell your old phone, and in theory sold the Samsung for more than I bought it for.  I'll wait until the money is in the bank before I let you know if that service worked right.

As for the iPhone 5.  Now that I am back drinking the Apple Kool-Aid, I'll probably just buy it when it comes out.  I mean sure, it will probably cost me the best part of $500, because I am not eligible for a cheap upgrade until 2013.  But so what.  I understand the business model, and I get that these modern smart phones are worth more than they sell them for with the contract.  Just don't expect me to camp out on the day of release.  Apple may own me, but I still have some dignity.