Small Business Saturday 2012 Results

Just a quick update on how Small Business Saturday turned out for me. I missed the chance to last year even though my fiancée reminded me. Not this year; I had multiple reminders set! I posted some details the week before signup began:

http://umlawgator.blogspot.com/2012/11/sign-up-for-amex-small-business-saturday.html

I was disappointed my local Thai place didn't sell gift cards, or I would have gone that route à la Mommy Points. I ended up buying five $25 gift cards at the hardware store Strosnider's. That will probably end up being a free weed whacker!

I've gotten the $25 credits already even though AMEX says they can take weeks to post. One credit ended up being for a restaurant I ate at Saturday night instead of the gift card I bought earlier in the day, but no matter, just an anomaly with the order the pending charges cleared.

Sign up for AMEX Small Business Saturday!

Registration opened this morning for a great AMEX promotion, Small Business Saturday. My fiancée told me about it last year, but I was too late trying to register. If you spend $25 or more at a designated small business, you get a $25 statement credit back from AMEX. You can do it once per card, and you can register multiple cards. Don't miss it, register today at shopsmall.com! Here is a direct link to the enrollment page. Then look at the store map and plan your purchases for next Saturday.

You can register any AMEX charge or credit card, except corporate or prepaid cards. That means you CAN register cards from organizations like Macy's and Citibank. I have one of each and registered them both in addition to my AMEX-issued cards.

I'm excited to be participating in this great event that both supports small business and saves me money!

If you're looking for a local business in the DC area, my fiancée's shop in Bethesda, Wiggle Room, is on the Shop Small list. It's a great place to find stuff for kids, from clothes to toys to strollers, as well as women's maternity clothes!

Two Citi AAdvantage Cards Offering 50k Miles until 12/31/12

Update 12/13/12: Today is the last day to apply for these official 50k offers!

I noticed a new offer on citi.com today for 50k AA cards. This is perhaps not as good as the 50k offers that appear without landing pages, as those credit the bonus points all at once, but better than the usual 30-40k official offers. With this offer you get 40k points with the initial minimum spend and then 10k more with an additional spend requirement, making this almost like a retention bonus. I'm still happy to see it, though.

The offer states:

"Earn 40,000 bonus miles after making $3,000 in purchaess in the first 3 months, and additional 10,000 AAdvantage bonus miles after $10,000 in purchases in the first 12 months of cardmembership."

If you met both requirements for two-stage bonus points, you'd end up with 63,000 AAdvantage miles, not a bad haul. That's 50,000 bonus miles plus the one mile per dollar you'd earn on $13,000 in spending (unless you earned a greater multiple by making some purchases from AA).

Here is a link to the landing page that goes to both offers.

MommyPoints has a good overview of the AA card offerings here:
http://boardingarea.com/blogs/mommypoints/top-5-family-credit-card-deals/

If you're flying AA between now and 12/31, whether you've booked already or not, you should click on this: http://bit.ly/AAThanksYou

Double miles for free!

HT to Lucky; I saw it on his blog first and then AA posted it to facebook.

From the AA facebook post:

Thank you for your support and loyalty in recent months. To show our thanks, we’re offering AAdvantage® members double elite-qualifying miles and points through December 31, 2012. Visit http://bit.ly/AAThanksYou to learn more.

AMEX Passbook Integration is Live

Per the @AmericanExpress twitter feed, they are now live on Passbook. I was very excited to hear that, because I imagine I'll use it a lot more than, say, American Airlines. The boarding pass thing where you get push notifications if your gate changes sounds awesome, but apps like this and Starbucks will help me more on a daily basis.

You need to follow this link in Safari on your iOS device: http://aexp.co/vn0 

I registered one card, and it worked, but I wondered about my other cards. I asked the helpful folks at @AskAmex, who replied almost instantly that you can currently link up to three cards with Passbook. Not bad, but I told them I'd look forward to it automatically adding all your cards in the future.

9/28/12 update: I discovered today that "Cards issued by third-party financial institutions are not currently eligible for this program." That means my Macy's and Citi AAdvantage AMEX cards will have to be lonely until Passbook can handle them.

How to take still photos while recording video on the iPhone5

There is a lot to say about the new iPhone5, but one thing that might not be evident is how to take advantage of the feature to take still pictures while shooting video. If you do a google search, right now the results only talk about the addition of feature, not how to actually use it. While shooting, a camera button will appear near the red recording indicator. That's it!

This is both obvious and non-obvious at the same time...that button reminds me a lot of the button to switch between front- and rear-facing cameras, so it might be easy to miss if you are trying to figure out how to take stills. A friend of mine asked how to use this feature, so I figured I'd post an example.

The image below is not a good example of what the iPhone can do as far as image quality; it's just there to illustrate where the still image capture button is located. I was moving quickly in a dark room, filming my dog in front of my shoes.

Purchase Decision on the iPhone5

I've decided to buy an iPhone 5. It's not as if I'll be the only one, but I'm sharing my thoughts because until today, I was not sure I would upgrade. The thing I did not see coming is that the purchase decision is as much about the resale value of my old iPhone as it is about the features of the new one. 

I wrote recently about spending two years with the iPhone 4, and it has been a great experience. In that post, I said "it will take quite a good offering to convince me to part with cash and my old phone for a new one." When I said that, I did not anticipate just how little cash it would take to make the upgrade happen.

Everyone is talking about 4G, but speed is a non-issue for me. It was hardly part of my purchase decision at all. 3G has been good for me in DC. I wish it was faster, yes, but if you download more than several gigabytes you will either get throttled (if you have "unlimited" data) or cut off because you hit your cap. This means that I can't do anything truly new on 4G/LTE. The things I could do on 3G, I'll be able to do faster now. However, anything that requires so much data that it was not possible over the older, slower, connection is still out of reach.

My fiancée has the 4S, and she's not upgrading; I think if I had the 4S then I'd also skip this model. However, coming from the 4, I am really looking forward to the new phone. The camera is going to be the biggest difference for me day-to-day. Faster and better low light performance is even more important than the increase in megapixels. 

There are numerous other improvements that, while not convincing on their own, add up to a nice package. More importantly, I sold my old phone for $175 to gazelle.com today. I could have gotten more on ebay (it is really amazing how much resale value these things retain), but that's extra hassle and dealing with bidders who might not pay. I haven't decided which model phone I'll get, but it'll probably be the base 16GB (although I wish the base was 32GB now). Granted, I'll have to sign a contract, but the ability to move up 2 generations for $25
out-of-pocket was a huge part of my decision. I am considering the 32GB model as well as applecare, so I may end up spending a bit more, but I have definitely decided to buy.