hello world

I must have been just a little bit bored this morning when I took the time to read an email that had arrived in my mailbox earlier that day. It was from Delta Airlines and contained my frequent flyer summary. Normally, I wouldn't be too interested. I haven't flown with Delta in several years and can't even remember the last time I sat in a Skyteam plane. These days I'm more often traveling with budget airlines with twenty-pound tickets but no frequent flyer programs and thus nothing to keep track of.

This mental hibernation almost cost me dearly. My Delta account contains nearly enough miles to make it across the Atlantic in style – or two times in cargo. The email I read because I had nothing better to do at that moment alerted me to the fact that my miles would expire by the end of June. By the end of this June, to be more precise, 2009.

This came as somewhat of a shock. How could I reset the clock? I have no plans of using Delta in the next four months. In fact, I have no plans at traveling by plane at all. Good thing that there is something called the internet. I googled my problem and found an answer in no time. The brilliant suggestion was to order something little through the airline's shopping portal, earn miles for this and restart the count-down on the existing miles in the process. Dutifully, I signed up. Now what? The portal is geared towards American shoppers and presents a million sites that all pride themselves in free shipping in the lower 48. That wouldn't be of any help to me. And while I'd like to get some new Banana Republic chinos, I've never been happy to by clothes without trying them first. I was in need of something virtual.

Thank goodness there's iTunes. They are in cahoots with Delta. I can buy a little song and get two miles in return, neither of which I need. But the completed transaction will have the side-effect of causing activity on my Skymiles account. And life begins anew.

I was wondering how iTunes would know that I've made my way because of Delta, that Delta in other word caused my sudden outburst of commercial desire. I understand how refereeing works on a website, but iTunes is a separate application. Once again, the font of unlimited wisdom helped me out. The bottom line is it just works, and there's no reason to worry. With my United credit card, which is about to expire (There's another little problem.), I opened an Apple account and got Chess/Backgammon for my classicPod. This, you might have guessed it, propitiously reset the count-down on my Mileage Plus account as well, although that wasn't quite as urgent. When all was done and I was dizzy from signing up and shopping, I realized that I had made the deadline for 1000 bonus miles by two days. Signing up to Skymiles shopping is currently sweetened by a little promotion – of which I knew nothing prior to all this. I'm clearly not bored enough to read all the email advertisement I get.