cruel to be kind

So what to do with some spare time in the US?

After recovering from some cold – don’t stay in the cold outside even if over the day you where too hot as the aircondition and the weather will kill you *grrrrrr* – I went to the delicious birthday bash at Yahoo. As most options travelling there where not really compelling I engaged in my first adventure of getting a rental car ever.

It wasn’t as bad as expected – after all I was a bit concerned about this automatic gear. I still prefer stick, but I can deal with the other …

As it seems they will let me rent a car. An automatic one, which I never drove. So we will see how good this will go, but a warning: Stay away. ;)

Foreign woman with a high degree of talent of not finding the way on the street tonight.

Now I need to get to the printer downstairs to print out all those direction maps ;)

Update: I have created this page for us to add our possible presentations and wishes.

Well, at least that is working as planned, the geek dinner is happening – now wish me luck I can take my Laptop on Board. Hm. I should consider getting a drive to the airport by a friend just in case to give him my laptop if … but I digress.

The plan:
Flying to London on Friday morning (urgs), Geekdinner in the evening before, then Barcamp and back on monday evening. And the idiot I am: I should have flown back on tuesday to have monday to …

You might think this subject is supposed to be Sinatra (I love Sinatra. Have to find my CD to rip it and play loud Sinatra the whole day).

If your first though is “sweet tier points!” then you know your BA tricks. Having read a posting of somebody today in the BA forum on flyertalk I was very happy to find out that my first thought indeed was Sinatra and not that of a good British Airways tier point run!

[Flights between Bahrein and Dohba are considered good tier point runs. Other than most airlines, BA has a so called tier …

To those people who not know what the excitement about 64B means – it is like the best seat on biz class on BA.

And some consider upper deck to be even better than first class. So Nicole, business must be going great if you can fly business class and sip nicely champange in the lounge and blog from there?

Well, kind of. ;) I did intent to fly Word Traveller Plus on BA which has two major charming attributes: You can (if available) upgrade for 25000 miles to Biz (and othere than some American Airlines Biz means something nice on BA), …

As I am around, why not go to Wiki Wednesday

(Okay, to be precice: Tim got me interested in another meethingie Tuesday evening so this was a great ‘excuse’ to go back to the Cardinal Hotel and the Coupa Cafe. ;))

A quick update: I am back in SFO again, this time for blogher where I am teaching advance ‘podcasting stuff’ and also to meet nice people in the area. Already I have encountered a lot of familiar and new faces. Which is the nice part: You already know a lot of people from online and now it is very often “oooooh this is you!!!”

Which was also true in San Francisco where I was at Podshow – no, not what you think. ;) I was there to meet Andrew Grumet (had a nice coffee with him, have to do that again!) and …

One of my latest obsessions is checking out flyertalk.com forums, who are a tremendous wealth of information – and a massive time waster. ;) Just to give you an impression – I am actually thinking about signing up for two more credit cards because they are going to be better to my miles on two different programs. ;))

I am trying between getting the best out of everything as well as keeping my privacy – which is a struggle if you are dealing with American companies! But back to the fun. One of the post I just read made me laugh so …

I just saw a beautiful shot of the Golden Gate Bridge on Peter Kaminski’s photos – great new desktop background for me to get excited about my trip!

Well, it definitely should be exciting, because I just spend some serious money on three trips flying to the US – and that is just the flying … Spent an hour on the hotline for making my payment and rechecking everything about my flight tickets and it seems, as if my first agent I phoned to really was a crack at what he was doing.

I have tried three different phone agents from British Airways …

Preparing more interviews for the upcoming DLD in Munich, I wanted to give you a new update on my odysee to come to the US …

• I think I have settled for bookings with British Airways now – those World Traveller Plus seats look too good compared to others.
• I think (I hope) I understood their milage promotional system.
• Too bad I don’t have an Amex or a credit card from them, because I will have to book all three flights to the US in one row – flights over there otherwise are full. Having this amount of money in miles would have …