tombiro.com

Yeah, yeah, I know you don’t care, but I’m still *so* buying this poster. I mean, I need to replace the Miami Vice ones that Thilk hooked me up with last year.

Plus, I have an open wall in my office that needs decorating.

I can’t be the only one who finds it slightly amusing that Pop-Tarts is the primary sponsor for the Idols Live! Tour featuring the top 10 finalists for FOX’s American Idol, right?

So, back in April I had gotten an Amazon.com gift certificate, and had promptly used it to pick up a few things, including a print sub to Dwell and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which I’d expected to land on Saturday, given that I had guaranteed publish date delivery. Well, I apparently wasn’t the only one who didn’t get their copy, apparently, and I’ve heard the same from elsewhere.

This morning, I used Amazon’s help option, which takes you to a page where you can contact them directly from the site regarding your order in question. While the unfortunate thing with the site was that it didn’t see this order for me to “auto-populate” the fields with because it wasn’t “recent,” even though it said I was looking at recent orders and recently shipped orders, it did take me to an option where I could have someone call me right away. Actually, you type in your number, put in your order number, and it calls you right back, but then someone answers the phone. So, after maybe a minute of hold time, I got a great customer service rep who took some basic info from me to connect me to my account and order in question (the first question was the order, not like keying in all your crap only to answer it all again when you call the cable co), and he checked out what was up with my missing HP7. After about 30 seconds, he verified that I was good to go with regard to the guaranteed delivery, hadn’t set it up incorrectly, and that given the guarantee offered to me, they would refund that purchase to me within 24 hours, and that the book was mine to keep.

Am I bummed that I don’t have the book just yet? Sure. Am I kinda over it because I got my book paid for by Amazon.com and they stood by their word, really with no questions asked? Absolutely. Now, I’m sure if I were a parent of two and my kids had planned on spending Saturday afternoon or Sunday reading the book I might feel differently, and would probably have gone out and bought it at the store had it not shown up by 7pm on Saturday evening anyway, but that’s neither here nor there. Great example of good business sense, and hopefully for Amazon (and UPS / USPS) there aren’t too many people who didn’t receive their HP7 this weekend, or the dollars involved might look a little different when it all shakes out. I mean, it’s not like they make money on it anyway.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but we shouldn’t be shocked at all by this news that the launch of Apple’s iPhone “could emerge as the most succesful product introduction of the 21st century,” should we? I haven’t really seen anything with cross-gender, attitude, and cultural impact like this had in the runup to the product being sold, post-sale, and now that people have begun to see them around town, so while 1/3 of people seems like a huge number, based on the reax I’ve seen by people who have seen me using mine, it’s not at all surprising.

iPod, anyone?

My pal Joy just IMed with this item from Eater, about how NYC’s Magnolia, famous for its cupcakeness, was shut down (until at least Friday, they say) for not having two sinks, as declared by the Board of Health in the city.

What will the hordes of people coming to re-live something that some people claim was made big by Sex and the City, but was really pretty good all along?

What will Chris Thilk do without Magnolia cupcakes?

More Cloverfield, Slusho, whatever. Chris informs that Apple’s got the 1-18-08 trailer up on its site, here.

Over at the unfiction forums, one enterprising poster wrote up what looks like a pretty close snag of the audio from the trailer.

Okay, looks like this one’s been up a bit and will hopefully stay as such.

Pretty screwed up, no? It really could be just about anything. Aliens, monsters, some sort of “God”-like creature, the Robeast from Voltron, or heck, something from Transformers. Something curious that a few folks mentioned in the last day was that there was no “this preview approved for xyz audiences” before this particular preview, then it went straight into the movie. I’m not positive of this, but does anyone else remember?

Well, I’ve been striving to figure out what I’m going to do on the blogs I write on ever since AdJab had its doors unceremoniously closed, and I guess for the moment, I’m going to cover entirely too much “Cloverfield” – a la, the movie that’s previewed before Transformers and currently residing at 1-18-08.com – here on this blog. Or, maybe that’s what I’ll do for the next five minutes.

In case you haven’t heard, there are tons of people looking and looking and looking for information on this particular film, a few random “blogs” that have cropped up that some people believe are part of the viral marketing or an alternate reality gaming experience, and a bunch of other things including the movie asking for YouTube to continually drop the trailer from its site whenever someone else uploads it. Chris Thilk is, of course, covering all this, and there’s a ton more if you do five seconds of research, but I really wanted to point you all to the video below, from the Nostalgia Critic.

Caught this over at Hysterical Speculation, where they’re having entirely too much fun with this whole Cloverfield thing, too.

Thilk is having his way with Mike Arrington’s take on how the $599 iPhone has about $220 in hard materials cost. First off, who the F cares. Clearly they’re that smart because everyone’s buying them.

Additionally, have we at all – and some commenters have begun to – factored in the advertising costs (staggering), the network costs to keep a site like theirs up pretty much solidly since the launch on Friday, the amount of infrastructure put in place to make iTunes work, irrelevant of AT&T’s issues with getting activations done? Oh, and the advertising. Sorry, had to mention it twice.

Again, who cares. Sometimes I read things, and it’s almost like that the person who wrote the piece, for that one quick moment when they hit “publish,” felt a little twinge of socialism or communism coming on, and let it fly. It’s a nonessential, and they can charge what they want. We can argue whether or not gasoline is an essential or not, and if we want to have a discussion about profits for those companies who claim they are “passing on” the hard costs but making more and more money, then that’s fine, but this isn’t that time.

Congrats, Apple. Enjoy the cash. I should have bought some stock six months ago.