My 40th birthday is coming up and I’m kind of freaked out about it. I’m no cult-of-youth guy and have a healthy fatalistic sense of the course of human life. There’s just no denying that 40 is a pretty big turning point, particularly physically.

Happily I’ll be spending my actual birthday in France at a fabulously decadent restaurant, so at least I’ll be getting a good start on my gout.

I just had a remarkably good service experience signing up for the JP Morgan Select Card (from Chase). I don't normally write testimonials for banks, but credit cards are a necessary evil and this one seems pretty good.

The key feature for me is it contains a European-style transaction chip for Chip and PIN processing. If you've ever been a poor American trying to use a gas pump or train ticket machine in Europe and been unable to do it, it's because the US credit card is way behind the times and doesn't contain a chip. Well, a few do now; this card has both a chip and a traditional magnetic stripe. Unfortunately it does not have a PIN, that'd be too standard, they call it "chip and signature". Which means I still sign at a restaurant, but in theory an unattended machine will just approve the transaction without the PIN. We'll see.

The ordinary credit card features seem OK too. No foreign transaction fees. Some sort of reward points system whose details I didn't look into. Lots of consumer protections, etc. $95/year and 13.24% APR on purchases.

I had awful service from Virgin America recently. A flight cancellation, a software system disaster, and many mistakes from agents on the ground all worked together to make a truly awful travel day. I like what Virgin is trying to do, but until they get their act together after their disastrous switch to a new reservation systems I suggest avoiding them.

On Nov 2 Ken and I had Main Cabin Select tickets from JFK to SFO. That morning I called and paid extra for first class upgrades (score!). Then two hours before departure, the flight was cancelled. The scene at JFK was chaos because Virgin has just that week changed its online reservation system and it wasn't working. The staff didn't know how to use it, the system didn't work, customers were sitting on the floor waiting for things to get straightened out.

Rebooking us was beyond the JFK staff's ability to cope. The nice woman at the desk kept saying "we have this flight, do you want it?" and then spending ten minutes trying to book it, only to find some other agent had grabbed the seats while she was typing. She finally rebooked us on a different airline. Only they booked it wrong, twice, and I spent 90 stressful minutes going between terminals three times trying to get the flight booked correctly.

I will say the agent we talked to was pleasant and professional. She just was unequipped to make their own software work. And then they were so stressed and rushed they kept screwing up the booking on a different airline. Poor service is de rigeur for airlines but Virgin America claims to be something different. Sadly it wasn't last month.

Ken and I are headed to New York for the second half of October. No particular reason, just to hang out and see friends and eat well and maybe see a show or two. If you're in New York or on your way through, drop me a note and we'll get together! Recommendations for restaurants and things to do are also welcome. We'll be staying down in SoHo.

Save some money and power and repair bills: go clean your refrigerator's condenser coils. You should be cleaning them every few months and you probably never have. It's really pretty easy, takes just a few minutes. Find the coils and/or grill. In old fridges they're on the back, but modern fridges put them down below, near the floor. Cut the power. Brush or vacuum the dust off. Turn it back on. Done! I just removed a mat of dust for the first time in far too long and suddenly my fridge is much quieter. Not just running less often: my guess is the fridge has a variable speed fan that was working way too hard. (Computer heat sinks have a similar issue). Wish I'd thought to do this sooner; this kind of maintenance is the sort of life skill I'm sadly missing. Now I'm off to go replace my furnace filter.

I recently went to my doctor for a regular checkup. he ordered some labwork. Nothing special; basic blood and urine tests to see that I'm doing OK. Here's the thing: the billing is entirely insane. I have individual health insurance from Anthem, and the insurance adjustments are completely incomprehensible. Here's an itemized bill.

Billed	Savings	My co-pay	Insurance pays
44.00	36.51	2.25	5.24
51.00	40.81	3.06	7.13
99.00	86.08	3.88	9.04
68.64	63.06	1.67	3.91
61.36	56.37	1.50	3.49
78.00	68.64	2.81	6.55
$402.00	$351.47	$15.17	$35.36

My health care provider charged me $400 for the tests. They only got paid $50, an 88% discount, because that's what Athem has negotiated. I paid $15 of that $50. Huh? How do these numbers make sense? In no way is this free market rational pricing.

When my mother died, in 2000, she went to the hospital with urgent problems. With no insurance. They operated on her for a few hours, she spent a day in intensive care, and she died. It was pretty fucking awful. It also cost some $50,000, billable to her estate. The hospital gave us a 35% discount for paying the bill in cash.

I'm fortunate to be able to afford to buy my own health insurance and healthcare. My family was fortunate that my mother could get the care she needed and the medical bills didn't bankrupt us. In neither case does the pricing make sense. It's particularly bizarre that the primary value of insurance seems to be pre-negotiated lower prices for healthcare. Instead of, you know, insurance.

I've been on a productivity kick lately, trying to figure out how I manage so few hours of hacking on my projects and so many hours wasting time web surfing. I mentioned a failed experiment offloading web surfing to the iPad. The other thing I've been doing is running time tracking software, the web based RescueTime and the Windows app TimeSnapper. They're both useful.

Both programs watch what what software you use on your computer during the day and then give you reports of your usage classifying time as productive or non-productive. TimeSnapper's special feature is recording screenshots every 10 seconds and letting you review your day. RescueTime's special feature is community-based classification so that it already knows that github.com is productive time whereas 4chan.com is not. Thanks to these tools I now know (for instance) that I spend nearly an hour a day on Metafilter. Ouch!

The virtue and the failing of these tools is they are mostly passive recorders; they are great for monitoring behaviour, not modifying it. A lot of productivity guides suggest some sort of action to say "I am working now"; punching into a time clock, starting a 30 minute timer, etc. That works for me at times but it also makes hacking feel like more of a chore than I would like. (I envy Ben Franklin.)

One thing I dislike is the monitors often report bad news. TimeSnapper's primary report is a "Productivity Grade" where some days I rank 20%, 30%: talk about a failure! RescueTime's report shows the average user is "0.52 efficient", not a very auspicious goal. It's just a language problem but it seems important.

Another drawback of these tools is privacy: they record every program and website you use. There's ways to mitigate disclosure: temporarily switch monitoring off, encrypt TimeSnapper screenshots, tell RescueTime not to record specific websites. RescueTime has found a market as a tool to let managers snoop on their employees (with disclosure). Useful, but also a bit creepy.

My free month of TimeSnapper is up and I won't be paying $25 for it. It's a good tool and the screenshots are nifty and occasionally useful. But it takes a lot of disk space and the reports aren't so useful. I'm going to invest a bit more time (and $6/month) into RescueTime, I think I have more to learn from it.

Every few weeks I get unsolicited blank checks in the mail from my credit card company, Capital One. "Instant cash!". Of course it's a trap; the cash is a loan at some poorly disclosed usurous rate, probably 20%. So I dutifully tear the checks in half and throw them away.

Now Capital One has gotten more aggressive and is sending me regular emails asking me to transfer balances. So convenient! "Keep in mind, you’ll pay a transaction fee of 3% of each transaction amount". Another unwanted offer. I asked them to stop emailing me.

Unfortunately, the option to be excluded from our balance transfer solicitations is not available at this time. We're sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

I only gave them my email address so I could get emailed statements. Apparently there's no way for me to opt out of their scammy attempts to trick me into borrowing money from them at outrageous rates. Awesome.

I'd cancel the card, but they're the last US card that doesn't charge a 2-3% scammy foreign currency conversion fee .

Our cat Ejnar died March 30th. He'd had kitty cancer, then surgery last fall. He seemed to have fully recovered but we knew there was a good chance it'd come back. And so it did. Ejnar came to us as a stray young adult in 2001, knocking on our third floor porch door looking hungry. Ken took pity and was cutting up a hot dog for him. I said "you know if you feed him, he'll end up being our cat." And so we did, and he did, coming a little more into our house every day. We put a collar on him with a note saying "your cat? call us!" but no one ever did. So after a couple of weeks we decided he was ours. We named him after a random bishop's name we saw on a church in Denmark. (Pronounced Eye-nar, not that he ever knew that.)

He was a good cat. He'd clearly been someone's pet, affectionate, social, good with the litter box. He even knew not to jump on tables, although if we left our plates with chicken bones on the dining table they'd be gnawed clean on the floor in the morning. Polite cat, but perfectly happy to help himself when unseen.

His favourite things were rabbit fur mouse toys, fish and shrimp feast, the warm air from the heater vent in the morning, and sitting snuggled between Ken and I on the sofa. He was a chatty cat, I still hear his inquisitive "mrowr?" in my mind when I come downstairs in the morning. We miss him.

Last year I got serious about trying to lose some weight. After literally a lifetime of neglecting my diet and exercise I was tired of getting fatter. So I've been paying attention for the last year and have lost 20 pounds. And I feel good about what I'm doing, think I can sustain it. My goal has been a permanent lifestyle change, not a temporary deprivation; so far so good. Blue: weight. Red: trend. Grey: 5 pound rules

The two steady drops at the start of the graph (8 pounds and 5 pounds) came from calorie counting, with a predictable 3 pound gain in the middle when I took a trip. Counting calories really helped me pay attention to what I was eating, to learn to moderate. But it's a daily bummer and a pain, so eventually I gave up on it.

I didn't do any specific dieting again for a few months but still managed to keep a steady weight. Then a few months ago I started deliberately limiting carbohydrates, particularly sugar, inspired by Good Calories, Bad Calories. That seems to be working for me, another 6 pounds, and it feels sustainable. I'm skeptical of the low-carb fad of the last decade but having a salad instead of french fries and avoiding fruit juice and coke seems to make a difference.

The one thing I'm not doing is getting more exercise. Honestly, I'm just lazy. Biking is the only exercise I ever did sustainably but San Francisco is actively hostile to bikes. But I need to find something physical to do, for my health if not for weight loss.

Fun aviation fact: every pound I lose is another minute of fuel I can carry in an airplane.