I'll probably get our daughter an iPod shuffle for her birthday in April (and hope that she never sees this post), and may eventually get one myself. If they held about twice as many songs at that price point, I'd probably jump at one right now.

A few months ago I found another site that I cannot relocate at this point. It allowed you to explore the many conversion options to move miles from one program to another. I had about 11,000 miles in Continental's program that would have expired in about a year. It showed me that you can convert Continental miles to Amtrack Points, and then convert Amtrack Points to United Miles with no loss of miles at all. Well, the conversion needs to be done in increments of 5,000 miles (in this case), so I still have about 800 miles in the Continental program that will likely be lost, unless I chose to cash them in for a magazine subscription or something like that.

There are not always clear conversion paths. I have about 24,000 Hawaiian Air miles, and there does not appear to be any way to move them to United without sacrificing a lot of the miles. I would have lost 80% of the miles in the conversion.

Points.com is another site that allows you allows you to move your miles around, but is not as comprehensive as that other site I found.

I'm still looking for an angle as good as the Chocolate Pudding Guy. That was sweet in more ways than one.

Postscript: InsideFlyer does have a mileage converter, but I don't think this is the one I saw.

My wife and I already contributed to the American Red Cross' International Relief Fund, so they'll most likely be getting some more from us as the semester moves on. It seems like a great, albeit potentially expensive, way to break a bad habit.

My initial two year contract is nearly up, and I'm seriously considering either cancelling it, or perhaps changing to a plan that allows me to buy blocks of minutes and pay as I go. I simply don't use the phone enough to justify the $50 a month plan that I have.