Waiting mining hardware sucks but I have a little personal story to tell about this and lemonades stands someone here mentioned.
Back on 2012 when I was still in BR, I paid 50% for my whole batch of ICA, the only way I get them for a better price and maybe resell for others - later I managed to sell three - still a good chunk of bitcoins given away, though. Once I got the batch confirmation I flew to BJ to pick them up, the initial idea was to bring them back home but I think the wandering I had in the hutongs changed my mind. For about a week every morning I had the amazingly dirty and juicy street food as breakfast, long enough to learn some food names and get acquainted with the owners, I also for the first time in my life played ping pong in a such good condition table. Better than the tourney ones since they are located outdoors and made to resist and Im not talking about the metal ones full of rust or the stone ones we find everywhere in BJ. Anyway, a group of elders, probably some ping pong old masters were always there and of course I had my ass beaten hard. I moved on. After this week in an old half rebuilt neighborhood I changed plans, found out about the electricity rates and about the relentless smoke cloud that hovers entire asia too, finally got a nice apartment to live. Some day when the ngzhang phone was still a thing we could rely on, I contacted him to ask about the boards and he took me to see a nice stack of icarus of early batches he had mining, the same one we saw in his thread. I realized I was close. Out there in the balcony corner a tall a stack of cardboard. Imagine the trouble of packing and shipping all that stuff. Later we had dinner and I met the fancy chinese food. The dinner was great and like all fancy stuff, too costy to have everyday and people always busy that its not easy to have a cheap talk with anyone there.
Back to hardware, my batch was not ready yet, and he said I had to wait one more week, that was not the deal, no worries, and now I tell you all why I will always prefer the lemonade stand everytime I want lemonade. For that extra week of testing and mining Zhang gave me some yuans, not the mined bitcoins, but still a good sign of the guys fairness.
Why I did not order batch1? That seemed to me a huge bet I could not afford. No regrets and I jumped only at batch2 expecting only the reciprocity that everyone that trusted and sent them BTC again deserves.
Are u still in china? china is cool right?