I sent this note to Joe just a few minutes ago - his polite inquiry about finally ordering this thing may be occurring to others as well:

Joe - I did order it! Online from Best Buy on Friday, with it set for Chris to pick it up in his town. Alas, it seemed to hang in their system. I cancelled the online order that still was at the "order received" stage 36 hours later (there are processing stages and it is supposed to send you an email to pick it up 30 minutes later) and will try going to the store and paying and filling in the order to have Chris pick it up. We had hoped he could pick it up Friday evening. Multiple calls to Best Buy assures me that the processing of the online order is out of the hands of the customer service folks. I'll be posting an account of this today, but I did say in the thread that I've ordered it, I just haven't given a blow-by-blow account of the wait for Best Buy to act.

I am going to give this first attempt a few hours to clear out of their system and this afternoon I'll go over to the store and pay for it so that the transaction goes through at the point of purchase and then have it set for Chris to pick up. And I'll call the store in his area to be sure they see it on their end and will hand it over to him. I think both Chris and I hovered near the computers yesterday, checking for email from Best Buy saying to pick it up, and this morning when I checked in it still showed "order received" and none of the verification and processing stages reached.

That's Plan B. Hopefully that will be sufficient. If not, I'll order it from Sony. A savings of $20 from Best Buy is only good if you can actually get the machine you order!

SRS