yes, much appreciated! 

I just sent my payment to John's BTC address and did the signed message thing to arklan's gmail address.  Hope I did it correctly.

Wish he wasn't using gmail.  I feel like I just announced to the world what I'm doing.

ok I have the BTC now.  had to go the bitinstant route (non-anonymous), as I couldn't find anyone to trade fiat with quickly enough.   sorry for causing any hand-wringing over being a straggler.

will send the funds this evening when I get home to my qt-wallet.

Thank you OP and John for organizing this buy.

By "early as possible" do you mean exactly 15hr and 48 min from now? 

newbie here....please put me down for 2 units.

sorry for the late request.  I've been waiting over the past day or two for my noob 4hr limit to finally go away.  I will pay as soon as I can acquire some BTC, no later than this weekend.  Trying to arrange to meet someone to exchange fiat for BTC.  I've been mining on my GPU and recently ported the open source fpga code to a Virtex 5 development board I had laying around, but I've only managed to mine up about 0.4 BTC so far.  If anyone has suggestions on how to buy BTC quickly, that would be helpful.  located in the austin area.

and finally #5.  Now I just need to log those 4 hours before the ASICMiner auction time is up! 

#4 for me.  I should have signed up 6 months ago!

can anyone suggest a good smartphone app for bitcoin transactions, especially to be used for face-to-face exchanges of money to bitcoin?

Thanks for posting this.  Seems like buying local is the way to go.  Any suggestions on how to meet in person to buy?   Any smartphone apps that can be used when meeting in person that one could suggest using?

Hello.  I also just joined the forum.  My main interests are in mining, and working with the open-source fpga mining code