Amazon fumbles Lich King release

So, not wanting to drive all over the LA basin looking for a collector’s edition of the World of Warcraft expansion like I did two years ago when the last expansion came out, I ordered a collector’s edition and a regular edition from Amazon last week. The collector’s edition sold out later that same day.

Yesterday, Amazon sends me an e-mail saying that they will guarantee I’ll get the Wrath of the Lich King expansion on release day, for a small up-charge of a few dollars. But there’s a catch: You have to cancel the existing order and place a new one for it to qualify. OK, but the collector’s edition is sold out, guys. I don’t want to cancel that order and not get it.

So I e-mailed customer service, and initially was told “oh, no worries, we haven’t sent it out yet.” Thanks for actually reading the e-mail, guys. So I sent a follow-up, explaining the situation again. This time, the customer service person switched my non-collector’s edition copy (the one that I could cancel and reorder without worry) to the faster delivery method. Swell, but not what I wanted. The collector’s edition is still going to ship out later and require canceling and crossing my fingers to get same day shipping on it.

It’s amazing that Amazon was able to handle shipping out the Harry Potter books without trouble, but this year’s predictably millions-selling release is proving so difficult for them to get their arms around.

I’m considering just canceling the whole kit and kaboodle and driving all over the LA basin again on November 13.

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Yes, Virginia, I will be going to Blizzcon

I got the notification that a media pass will be waiting for me to go to Blizzcon in October. I will be taking a geek’s holiday from the local political races that Friday (and maybe sneaking out early on Thursday to pick up my ticket and goody bag, if I have everything done) and just forgetting about it all for one weekend. I will have put the final city council and school board candidate interviews to bed at that point, for publication in the October 14 edition of the Star, so the timing works out well.

And yes, I fully expect to be a huge target in PvP riding my Big Blizzard Bear mount around, and justly so, but that’ll be OK, too. Heck, by that point in the campaign season, getting stunlocked by a pair of undead rogues will feel like butterfly kisses.

I’ll be posting the usual reports on each of the panels here and elsewhere during Blizzcon weekend.

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iTravel

Now that the Florida adventure is over — my first flight with the iPhone and kid — there’s some things I’ll do differently next time:

1) Bring my old school 20 GB iPod with me for listening to purely audio stuff, like the audio version of Carl Hiaasen’s Nature Girl that I’m still not finished with. There’s no reason to run down the iPhone battery when I need it to check e-mail and SMS on layovers and want the iPhone to be good to go for showing They Might Be Giants’ kid music videos to the kid to take the edge off when he gets a little frantic after being cooped up in an airplane seat as long as he was.

2) Bring the right charging plug. I somehow ended up with an old Firewire plug-in cube, which was totally useless for recharging in the airport.

3) Invest in some portable iPhone speakers (with a horizontal display of the iPhone) for the kid to watch his TMBG videos, Sesame Street video podcasts and (next time) Looney Tunes cartoons. The iPhone external speaker just can’t compete with airplane noise and putting earphones on a 13 month old kid is too foolish to contemplate, especially if I want the earphones back in working order.

4) Invest in a back-up battery, just in case.

Overall, though, the iPhone was a great asset, letting me keep up with work e-mails (there’s a big pending arrest I’ve been covering for two months, waiting for it to go public, and didn’t want to miss it if it happened while I was in Florida) even as I was playing with James in the Gulf of Mexico outside Bradenton. It didn’t do anything my trio of Treos couldn’t do, but it did it all so much better and more elegantly that it was really a pleasure to use in comparison. Taking pictures and checking e-mail on the beach while chasing a kid down the shore would have been a good recipe for losing the phone or the kid with my Treo, but was totally natural with the iPhone.

It was amusing to see that, when we took off from Ontario, literally half of the plane seemed to be using iPhones, but the further east we went, the more exotic it seemed to my fellow passengers. I guess Californians really are trendy when it comes to their toys.

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Twitter experiment

We’re talking about possibly using Twitter to add more real time aspects to the Hesperia Star site.

We talked about it at first, I think, for liveblogging the election, but we would likely use it to cover meetings and such — George Landon’s dramatic resignation during a school board meeting is a prime example of the kind of news that benefits from maximum immediacy — and just to let readers understand our work flow.

So, anyway, I’ve got a Twitter feed. We’ll see how it goes, and if it’s something I stick with. (My one friend who uses it that I could find, Wendy, gave up on it a year ago, for instance.)

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iPhone ringtones

So, one wrinkle of switching a new phone is the eternal question of what to use as my ringtone. On my Treo 650, using Ringo, I had the instrumental opening of LL Cool J’s immortal “Going Back to Cali” for my basic ringtone.

For work-related calls, my Treo’s ringtone was a portion of Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry.” (Remember, this is my same sophisticated sense of humor that gave the world a black cat named Lucky.)

I also had the Barb Stanton theme song play whenever Barb would call. That wasn’t that often, but it’s my belief that, if you have your own theme song, you should get maximum use out of it.

Well, iPhones only use ringtones sold by iTunes, which in turn only sell ringtones of songs the record companies have signed off on. For instance, you can get the Lisa Marie Presley version of “Dirty Laundry,” but not one by Don Henley or the Eagles. So much for that.

So, at the moment, I’m deciding between the funky instrumental intro to Rilo Kiley’s “The Moneymaker” and the marimba portion of “The Nurse” by the White Stripes.

If anyone knows Don Henley or LL, give them a call and tell them to let their songs be made into ringtones, please.

And if you actually have your own theme song, feel free to buy it as a ringtone from iTunes and send it to me. (I use my Hotmail junk mail address as my iTunes account e-mail address.) I’ll set it to play whenever you call.