It's not a reward check, but Knuth read one of my articles and emailed me about it [0], which I found pretty cool.
You missed out on a great time at TUG26 [0], but hopefully I'll see you at TUG27 [1] in Paris :).
TUG28 will maybe be in Toronto (but this not official yet and could still easily change), which is pretty close to the US east coast.