He was indeed taking orders at that point, in fact the first couple of batches had been shipped by then.

If you sucessfully placed an order on 12th March 2003 then your order hasn't made it to the front of the queue yet. I placed my order around about the 8th March and I'm not at the front of the queue yet.

There were a few days when the website was down and/or some people where blocked from accessing it, which is why Patrick offered that email address as an alternative route to order them.