/dev/null/kevin

Since I complain about a lot of things I figured I should give credit to some good customer support from the Warner Brothers movie studio. 

I bought Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix on DVD last week.  I noted that it included a free digital download of the movie.  Yes, it requires windows and WMP, but free is free (or at least I already paid for it).  I entered by key and watched the download start, but just a few minutes in the downloading software hung.

Experienced people can see where this story is going.  On my second attempt to download the software I was told that my access key had already been used.  D'oh!  Worst fears realized.

Checking the support site they said I could call them during regular business hours (I was doing this on a Sunday).  There was also an email submission form for problems.  I sent the email, expecting to hear nothing, but only a few minutes later I received what I thought was just an auto-responder message.  Turns out it was a real response and they had reset my key!

Take 3 of the download worked perfectly.  All of this on a Sunday afternoon!  So congratulations, Warner Brothers DVD people on an excellent job!

I blogged previously about hating spoilers.  Thus, I avoided any and all references to the new Harry Potter book.  Now that I finished the seventh book I went looking to see what could have spoiled it for me.  As expected, there were lots of spoilers out there.

Note: while there are no spoilers in this blog, I do link to several sites that contain spoilers.  Use caution if you're like me and don't want details of HP7 revealed to you.

Professional book reviews, like movie reviews, are supposed to be free of spoilers.  The whole point is to read the review to see if you want to spend the money on the book or movie.  The New York Times got into some trouble for posting an early review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  I read the NYT review and it does contain some minor spoilers (like what "Deathly Hallows" means) but nothing too bad.  Nothing like this horrible review from my own San Jose Mercury News.  Do not read that review if you don't want the book spoiled for you!!  The Seattle Times also made a similar blunder and gave away too much because they used "clever" hints that were too transparent.  Sometimes even opinions are spoilers.

Other web sites had actual photographs of the first 500 pages.  I'm not linking to them because they are piracy.  Some sites printed summaries of the book based on those 500 pages.  Still more web sites printed fake spoilers, sometimes mixed in with real spoilers.  It's hard to know if these are pro-Potter or anti-Potter sites.  The could be pro-Potter sites trying to fill the web with lies so even if you read a real spoiler it won't have the same impact.  When you have lots of lies mixed with lots of truths then you really have nothing more than the usual speculation that occurs before the release of a big title.

There was also one lunkhead, a participant in a hot dog eating contest shown on ESPN, who displayed a Harry Potter spoiler on the back of his sign as he was introduced.  I won't say if his spoiler was true or false, but his intent was cruel, so I hope he chokes on a hot dog someday and is then saved by a Harry Potter fan.  Here's the video.  Don't view if you don't want to read the spoiler, and definitely don't read the comments on that page.