I had to take this shot. In July of 2007, my wife and I took the Trans Siberian Railway across Russia and down into Beijing. It is over 6 days of actual train time, but we broke it up by getting off for a couple days here and there. You can read about it in my Trans Siberian Railway article.

The washrooms were what my wife was looking forward to the most (yeah right). The were tight and the toilet emptied right out onto the train tracks. When the train would pull into a town they would lock the washroom door about 15 minutes before hand just so someone wouldn't go in a leave a surprise at the train platform for people waiting.

I took my camera and I had my Sigma 10-20mm wide-angle lens on. You can read the review of hte sigma 10-20mm here. I held the camera up in the corner of hte bathroom and pointed it down. It gives a real feel for the inside of these rooms.

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How much is a United Airlines Mileage Plus mile worth?

I thought I would take a look at another airline rewards program. This time it is the United Airlines Mileage Plus Program. After doing some calculations I valued one of the United Airlines Miles to be worth 1.28 cents or $0.0128 when you redeem your miles for flights and up to 5 cents or $0.05 when redeeming for restaurant certificates. I know that seems like a small number especially with how many decimal places I have gone to, but they add up when you are talking tens of thousands of miles to fly somewhere.

Keep in mind when I say the 1.28 cents/mile is for flights that is a rough estimate based off of one flight I found. Using it for other rewards will also change its value. I find travel is one of the worst uses for it in terms of monetary value. Entertainment rewards are usually the largest value/mile (probably because of the high markup). Using mileage plus miles for restaurant certificates on Restaurant.com, it appears that you can get anywhere from 2.5 cents/mile to 5 cents/mile. That is a much better deal.

I was not able to check electronics as they are not immediately accessible anyways until you reach Elite status.

The ultimate resource for the Mileage Plus Program is the United Airlines Mileage Program page itself. There are lots of links on how to redeem for rewards and earn miles by traveling or using a Mileage Plus Visa Card.

What Is The Value Of A United Airlines Mile?

I priced out a flight from New York to Los Angeles and back using Mileage Plus miles and just paying for it regularly. To try and be a bit more fair, I found the cheapest flight I could for a one week round trip as well.

The price to leave 2 weeks ahead was US$318.80 for a round-trip. The price in United Airlines Miles was 25,000 miles and no booking fee because I booked far enough in advance.

If you do a bit of math you find the $318.80 divided by 25,000 will give you the price per United Airline mile (I will just say price per mile from now on.

This number if US$318.80/25000 = $0.0128/Mile. This is rounded to the nearest 100th of a cent.

Keep in mind this is the value of an Mileage Plus Mile for this specific flight. You can calculate the value for any flight or any other products by taking the amount of money that would have come out of your pocket that you have saved by using the miles and dividing it by the number of miles you used. This will tell you the value per mile on that product. Some flights are better than others. Electronics are typically a lower rate of return for you mileage plus miles, but entertainment is better.

Advertised on the website are restaurant certificates from Restaurant.com. These are gift vouchers for partnered restaurants that you can search for on their website.

The gift vouchers are $25 for 1,000 miles or $100 for 2,000 miles. $25 divided by 1,000 and $100 divided by 2,000 give you 2.5 cents and 5 cents per mile. That is a very good return compared to the flight, but you have to remember you are getting food and that's it. Depending on what you are looking for, you are going to spend your miles on what you want.

If you like eating out and like traveling, it tells you to use your miles for eating out and just pay for your plane tickets out of your own pocket.

How To Earn United Airlines Miles

There are lots of ways to earn these United Airlines miles, but please note that they all involve spending money. There is no way around it, these programs are to encourage spending. The good thing is, you have to spend to live, so why not take advantage of by signing up for free programs like this.

Current methods of earning United Airlines Miles are:

• Booking flights with United Airlines. They are a member of Star Alliance as well. This is a group of airlines all over the world, so it opens up the possibilities of flying to a number of locations.
• Spending money using the United Airlines Mileage Plus Visa Card.
• Spending money at United Airlines Mileage Plus Partners. These include Safeway, NetFlix, Neiman Marcus, and variety of other stores and restaurants.

Mileage Plus Visa Card

Just a note about using the Mileage Plus visa. For me, credit cards are the quickest way to earn miles. Unless you travel a lot on business, it is probably the same for you. Currently there are 4 cards featured on the United Airlines Visa Card page. What visa card should you pick? Good question.

Let us get one thing out of the way. If you carry a balance on your credit card...THEN STOP IT!. These cards do not have a very good interest rate on them (still over 18%), so if you can find a credit card with a better rate, it will still save you more money (you might as well pay for the flight yourself).

Each card offers varying features, but they all have an annual fee (as far as I can tell). Keep in mind that you need to spend enough money on the card to get enough miles to pay for the annual fee. If you do not spend at least that much money, then you are better off getting a no fee credit card somewhere else.

An example of this is if I plan on using my Mileage Plus miles for travel then I will value them at around 1.28 cents per mile like I stated above. The lowest fee card that is available is $25/year. To recover that $25, I need to at least get that money miles. $25 divided by 0.0128 (price per mile) is around 1,953 miles. That many miles will get you around $25 worth of flights. Now, to get that many miles with the $25/year card (the Mileage Plus Visa Check Card) you need to spend around $3,906 because you only earn 1 mile per every $2 put on the card.

That was assuming the 1.28 cents/mile value I feel I am getting from booking a flight as well. Let's say that I plan on using my miles for eating out at restaurants that are affiliated with Restaurant.com. Now I can max out my value at 5 cents/mile. $25 divided by 0.05 comes out to $500. That is a far lower amount of money to be spent to break even.

That is just that card and using the value per mile from the example flight above. Each one has its own perks (for higher fees of course). Some pay 1 mile per every $1 spent, some pay 2 miles per every $1 spent on a United Airlines product (flight, etc). Except for the Platinum Visa card, they limit to how many mileage plus miles you can earn in one calendar year (60,000 or 100,000 for the Gold card). These can all play a factor.

I have done a chart for each Mileage Plus Visa card. In the chart I show the name of the card, the yearly fee, the dollars needed to be spent to earn 1 mile, how much spending it would take to pay off the annual fee when using the miles for travel and then for restaurants, what the yearly limit is on how many you can earn, and other notes. Keep in mind I am not factoring in the bonus miles for signing up, earning bonuses for buying certain products, or other factors. This is a worst case scenario for uninfluenced spending on each card. You might have spending patterns that cater to using a card and earning even more miles at a better rate.

As you can see there are a lot of options. Basically the higher the fee the quicker you can earn miles, but you need to spend the minimum amounts listed to get your money back on the annual fees themselves. They also give you more bonus miles on the higher fee cards, which gives you back some of the money, but remember that you are getting back miles and not real cash. Bonus miles are like "gift cards" for their own store, which will makes sure they get the money back anyways.

Using United Airlines Miles

United Airlines Miles can be used for a variety of options. Most common are flights or travel.

There can be some extra monetary fees with travel bookings depending on how far in advance you do it. Here are the rules currently:

• Award travel ticketed six days or less prior to departure $75.
• Award travel ticketed 7-13 days prior to departure $50.
• Award travel ticketed 14 days or more prior to departure $ 0.

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While on a visit to Terelj National Park in Mongolia during my wife and my Trans Siberian Railway trip, we spotted this young boy. He was watching some of his family getting horses ready. The temperature was above 40 Celsius and the sun was hot, but he stayed out in the heat and just watched.

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September results are in. It was a steady month again. I established records for both my Adsense and Kontera earnings and increased my passive income percentage.

At the current rate, I will be due for another payment from Google at the end of October as well.

Thoughts From My Life Traffic Stats for September

September's numbers and August's numbers are in brackets.

Traffic had very good jump this month. Actually a significantly higher jump in page loads and visitors which was very encouraging. It was still about 3 pages driving 90% of the traffic, but that's all good. I am not near my April Numbers, but I'm getting closer.

Thoughts From My Life Revenue

Overall, my earnings for September were $113.73.

• PayU2Blog: $50.00
• Adsense: $37.07
• LinkWorth: $14.00
• Kontera: $19.66
• PayPerPost: $0.00
• Chitika: $0.00

My Adsense established a new record and so did my Kontera. It is very encouraging to beat my April earnings with these passive sources, but actually have less traffic then I did then.

I also added a new revenue source called LinkWorth. They have a variety of advertising products both passive and active. Hopefully this will grow into a good revenue stream for me.

PayU2Blog is my active income where I get paid US$5 per posting that I do. IT is a good source of cash flow as I get paid every 2 weeks, but it does require constant work as the assignments come out.

I have dropped Chitika from my site as there earning were next to nil every month. If I move to more product reviews, I might consider placing their ads back on those pages.

Blog Revenue Summary

This blog has officially been live for 11 months now. My expenses are $7/month and I paid $2 to register the name for the year. I recently renewed for 2 years which will have a cost of $5 a month for hosting and $9/year for the domain name. I just paid the bill and it was $150.29, which will cover my expenses for the next couple years. I have grossed a total of US$771.14 since I started this thing and now my actual profit is $540.85.

Going forward, I am going to focus more on passive income this month (the same as last month). I have just posted another airlines reward article called The Value Of A United Airlines Mile And Collecting Them. I'm hoping with the larger market of the U.S. that it will drive some more traffic. I have submitted it to article submission sites as well.

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This was a sight to behold. My wife and I were in Mongolia for a few days in July of 2007. You can read about our Trans Siberian Railway trip here. Anyhow, we were driving out to Terelj National Park just a few hours outside of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia and we passed this truck. In the back was a camel who must have been quite used to this mode of transportation as he didn't look to distressed. They did have it tied down though.

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Time for some more cool links. This is a variety of stuff that I have just seen lately and like. It may have been on Digg, StumbleUpon, Slashdot, or some other site. Anyhow, here we go.

• MSNBC 2006 Year In Pictures

  Looks like he just reprinted them on his site, but I don't care. The pictures look fantastic. Worth a few minutes to look at.

• Adjusting Colors in Photos With Another Photo

  This is an awesome Photoshop technique to easily spruce up the colors in your pictures using someone else's photo or old artwork.

• John Chow Clears $20,000 In September 2007

  This guy continues to amaze me. This is a new record for his site.

• Heroes Comic Available For The DS.

  Another homebrew application that has been out for awhile, but the Heroes comic book that is free online has been made available to work on the DS.

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My Feedburner counter is showing 0 readers today. I think it was my own fault. The other day, I realized that I had never hid my rss feed xml file on my website, so it was still accessible directly. This does not work with FeedBurner stats very well because people could inadvertently bypass them and I would not get an accurate count of the subscribers.

In the process of setting up automatic redirects for requests to the xml file, I redirected the one FeedBurner was pointing to themself. What is wrong with this? I was redirecting them to their own site when they would try to access the feed on my site. Oops!

Anyhow, I set up a brand new rss file again and pointed FeedBrner to use that. Now my RSS feed is back in order and hopefully my RSS readers stay up at a decent level.

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Not much to explain here. We were in Listvyanka, a small town on Lake Baikal in Russia. The town is rather small and a small herd of cows was walking down the main road (there is only one main road along the shore and 3 others going off down seperate valleys). This cow stood behind this old car and promptly did what you are seeing. The man on the cell phone and his friend driving, promptly sped off when they looked in the mirrow on saw their bovine friend standing there.

This was part of a Trans Siberian Railway trip that my wife and I took in July 2007. You can read more about our trip in my Trans Siberian Railway article.

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While relaxing on a bench at the dock in Listvyanka, a small fishing village on Lake Baikal in russia, we watched this man leaning up against the post. He was chewing something quite intently (sunflower seeds?) and staring out into the lake. He looked quite peaceful so I had to take a picture.

This was part of a Trans Siberian Railway trip my wife and I took in July of 2007. You can read more about our Trans Siberian Railway trip here.

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It has finally happened. NHL hockey is now available online, for a price. NHL Centre Ice is offering the streaming video. It costs US$169 or CA$199. I don't know why there is the price difference considering the dollars are basically on par.

Free Trial

They are offering a free trial that ends on October 9th, 2007 so sign up if you want to check it out and see if it's worth it.

How NHL Streaming Video Works

Basically, you are allowed up to 40 games a week. These can be live streaming games or you can watch archived games that have already happened. There are situations where you cannot watch a game. They will blackout your local area if there is a station broadcasting it there. If there is no television coverage it will not be broadcast either.

I still haven't figured out how they determine the local area. If it is billing address or ip address. Billing address means where your credit card is registered to, but ip address means where you are actually physically located when you try to watch (unless you are using a proxy, but that is for more advanced computer people).

I am currently in Vancouver for the week and I was blacked out on the Calgary/Philadelphia game, so I am assuming it might be billing address.

4 Games At Once?

One of the coolest things is that you can pull up to 4 games at once and it plays them in the four corners of the screen. Very cool. You could run your own sports replays like your are at a sports lounge.

Check it out anyways, if you watch a reasonable amount of hockey and want to use your internet connection to watch it, this is definitely a decent way to do it.

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