Today is June 24th, the day the iPhone 4 is set to release in stores. If you have been paying attention, these new phones sell for $199 and $299, depending on size, and people have lined up despite robbery, heat and exhaustion in order to get their hands on one. I, on the other hand, received mine yesterday in the comfort of my own home. And I still haven’t paid for it.

I ordered the 16 gigabyte black version to replace my 3G, using AT&T’s online pre-order form. The experience there wasn’t great. Due to understandable outages based on demand, I had to try many times throughout the first night of availability in order to place my order. After refreshing the page while keeping entertained with something else, I finally got through, and placed an order instead of seeing their pesky “server busy” error messages.

I thought, “Great, I have my pre-order in. Now to just sit back and wait.” This wasn’t quite so.

Upon placing the order, I noticed that AT&T requested an authorization on my debit card for the price of the phone. This was expected; I needed to pay them. What was unexpected, however, was that two days later, the authorization had been removed. I literally had 200 extra dollars in my bank account, and didn’t know why.

Fearing that, like many customers, my order had been canceled, I tried to contact AT&T to see what happened. I first went the ‘no-human’ option and tried sending them an email through their web interface. There, I ran into this. Oops.

Resolving that the human option was the only way to go, I called up AT&T, and to my surprise, was given a lovely lady in the Midwest who told me that, “AT&T has double-charged people due to errors in their system, and in fixing the double charges they had removed people’s single charge.” She said they were in the process of correcting all charges, and that she would put it on her personal calendar to follow up with me at 1 p.m. sharp on the 25th.

I was happy. She confirmed that my order was in fact being processed — it wasn’t canceled — and she took the issue personally in order to follow up with me. Of all things, I must commend AT&T for their customer service. She was a gem.

But back to the iPhone. I waited, I was excited. I watched the tracking number as it shipped via UPS from Texas to Tennessee and finally to New York. I got home after a doctor’s appointment on the 23rd to have the iPhone in my hand and ready to use. After a bit of confusion reading AT&T’s quick start guide, I had the phone restored from a backup of my previous device, and was using it as if nothing happened. Kudos to iTunes and Apple for such a clean upgrade.

Fast forward to today. Checking my debit account, I still don’t see a charge. I see the account dwindle down as I make smaller purchases, but there’s still a happy bundle of money sitting there for AT&T to grab. It’s like Geico’s Kash: It’s theirs, staring at them expectantly from outside their kitchen window. From a business perspective I’m confused on how this would happen, and the giggly kid inside me wants to scream, “software bug in conjunction with human error!” But I don’t always get what I want.

Regardless, I’m not the only one who had this experience. I made a couple posts on Twitter to find others, and at least one other person received the same reward:

From @MrJakk: @timothyjcoulter Nope. Checked my bank statements today. Says shipped, but no charge…

Are we edge cases, or a large loss for AT&T that has currently gone unnoticed?

In any case, when I receive the call from that lovely lady from the Midwest tomorrow at 1 p.m., I’ll let her know that I haven’t been charged. Though I could keep the $200 as profit with the iPhone in hand, I at least owe it to the company for following up, if not for letting me ditch the heat, the stress, and the long lines.

UPDATE, 6/25/10: I woke up this morning to find a charge on my account. It seems like they’ve finally fixed it. Good for them.

My good friend Kevin Erickson sent a snapshot of his recent Google Maps session, complete with helpful highlights about where a bug lies. I hardly remember the positions of states aside from the biggies on the West coast, so I might’ve missed it. But upon further inspection it appears as if Google’s data even disagrees with itself.

Take a look.

But we don’t know where it is! Good thing we don’t manage your money.

This appears to be a catchall for multiple problems.

Uncertainty: Not a pleasing feeling for those less confident crossing a New York street.

A friend sent me this video last night. Funny MLB 2k9 bug cluster with commentary.

Caution: Strong Language

This is one of the oddest ones I’ve seen — and one of the easiest to reproduce, though it’s not straightforward.

UnitedHealthcare’s consumer website, myuhc.com, changes themes when you’re not expecting it. And all you have to do is click the back button.

Check out these two screenshots:

The first is what appears to be MyUHC’s newest website. The second is what happens when you read one of MyUHC’s articles, then click the back button. The second website looks a lot older, a lot less polished (graphics don’t align, less snazzy), though is apparently still functional.

What’s mysterious is the reproducibility. Earlier today, reproducing the theme change meant navigating to an article, pressing the back button, pressing the forward button once, then pressing the back button again. That was in Firefox. In IE, all I had to do was press the back button once, and the site mysteriously changed its look and content. Now, about six hours later, both Firefox and IE display the same behavior — but only sometimes.

Try it yourself.

First check out their article about swine flu (the first article in the list), then press the back button. If that doesn’t work, press the forward button, then the back button again. If that still doesn’t work, rinse lather repeat. It appears, too, that the only way to get the newer-looking website — and thus, the article about swine flu — back is to clear your cookies. Also, the url on what appears to be every page is “http://www.myuhc.com”. Shouldn’t there be something following the domain name?

Mysterious.

Update, 6/5/09: I found the following text in the “What’s New” section of the old MyUHC website:

New myuhc.com coming soon!

myuhc.com, is going through a complete redesign to better meet your needs. The new site will have enhanced tools and features; quicker and simpler access to these tools, and content that is easier to read and more detailed. Look for your new myuhc.com in June.

I guess they’re not done yet.

I saw Star Trek today and was given a little treat as I walked into the theater.

I used Fandango. I bought the tickets online, and then printed them using Fandango’s machine stationed in the movie theater lobby. Instead of getting the usual ticket and receipt, I was given this little extra:

It was a ticket for Watchmen! Not only is Watchmen out of theaters, but the date the movie was intended to be shown was March 9th. If you look closely, on the bottom of each stub, you’ll see a printing date of May 29th — way past the showing date.

So the question is: Did Fandango’s machine erroneously print me an extra ticket, leading to this little tidbit? Or did I pay for a ticket I never picked up?

The world may never know.

It’s beautiful. Take a look.

I got to it using Fandango’s search box in the top right hand corner twice in a row. The first time I searched for something that returned no results (try “Court St.”, as if you want to search for a theater on Court St.). The second time I used the box to search for something else, like “Star Trek”.

Not a huge error, but I’m always a fan of professional error messages.

Just after the United States’ much anticipated presidential and vice-presidential debates on foreign policy, YouTube’s new audio preview feature — a take away idea from the popular web-comic XKCD — isn’t doing much to boost America’s stature on the international stage. In fact, Youtube’s new feature, which I’ll affectionately refer to as YouTube’s Sam, probably supports the policies of the last eight years — as evidenced by this text-to-speech translation.

That’s right folks, you heard it here first. YouTube’s Uncle Sam translates “All your base are belong to us” as “All your base are belong to U.S.”

I can see the campaign commercial now: WARNING: He’s pro-war, and he wants you!… to get a moose rifle and join the Army.

Sorry, I had to do it.

Though he can’t really be pro-anything, he does seem to only support mostly-correct English, something I’d doubt shows up a whole lot in YouTube comments. That said, it’s a cool feature, but he won’t be making stump speeches anytime soon.

Here’s a few more gaffes I found while exploring what he had to say:

• “I am an American.” translates to “I A.M. an american”
• “Barack Obama” translates to “Barrack O-BAM-a” (Like “barracks”, and “Alabama”)
• “Sarah Palin” translates to “Sarah Pal-inn”, a common mispronunciation.
• “Mmmm, I like cheese.” translates to “em em em em I like cheese.”
• “em em em em” translates to “em-em-em-em” (faster)
• “em-em-em-em” translates to “emerganim” (I have no clue)
• “jajajaja,” Spanish for haha, translates to “juhjawjuhjuh”, even on Spanish YouTube.
• “haha” translates to “heya”.
• “ha ha” translates to “ha ha.” Must we type a space?
• “lol rotflmao you are sooo 1337 haxor.” translates to “lawl wrotefulmow you are sue-oh thirteen thirty-seven hackser.” So he’s not 1773. That’s fine.
• And last but not least: “Tim Coulter” translates to “Tim Coulter.” Can’t argue with that!

Oh, Sam only supports 150 characters for translation. And he doesn’t do the roflcopter.

Yep, you read that right.

According to the iPhone of Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock, a fellow coworker, Google’s stock recently dropped 1,182.22 points, putting it at a relatively unhappy low of 406.41. I mean, I knew the stock market was bad… but this bad?

Check out the damage in a screenshot below.