I had caught a story on Digg that there might be stock at Target on this past Sunday, so I got up at quarter to seven and drove over. I had meant to get up earlier because I knew they had a policy of giving out tickets at seven, but I'm not a mourning person. When I got there I saw some people waiting in their car which gave me some hope, but I was concerned that maybe I had already missed out. I scoped out the mall, but most, if not all, of the people were there to walk, rather than buy. I went back out to the car and waited. A little before eight, which is when the store opens, I saw a security guard and a guy with a clipboard walk around to the entrance. I walked over to them and they asked me if I was waiting for a Wii. Indeed I was, and they gave me ticket #18 of 45. About half an hour later, I had my Wii. So, more than 2 months late, mission is accomplished.

That night I went over to the Jones's and brought the new system along. In very short order we had nearly everyone in the house taking turns. We started off with tennis, which is straight forward and lots of fun. After that Steve and I did 3 rounds of boxing. Oh my goodness, I was exhausted. I drank an entire glass of water in one tip of the cup. Bowling took a couple tries to get the hang of, but I've gotten to the point where I can bowl turkeys now.

Later on we tried Rayman: Raving Rabbids. There's one game in it where you have to pump carrot juice with the nun-chuk attachment and spray it with the Wii Remote into the snorkel gear of the bunnies, in order to stop their progress. The pumping takes some serious work and I still feel sore from it now.

I'll go into a full discussion on the Wii later, but there are a couple of things to note about it. The controls are generally not 1:1, meaning that in a game like tennis the racket does not move exactly as you move the Wii remote. Essentially what happens is that you swing the remote and it triggers something that tells your character to swing. I don't necessarily think this is a bad thing, but if you go in thinking you'll have exact control, you will be disappointed. The other thing is that I don't know how much staying power these games will have. In a few months, when we've played these games a bunch, will they still be fun? I don't know.

The truth of the matter is that there are a number of things on the Wii to complain about and reasons to wonder about the longevity of the games, but right now it is tons of fun. Also, looking forward there's some games to be hopeful about. In particular is Super Mario Galaxy which looks awesome. And I'd be forever grateful to Wil Wright if he brings a version of Spore to the system.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the system only comes with composite cables. Carolyn was kind enough to offer to get any accessories that I need, since she works in a Best Buy. I took her up on the offer, and asked her for an s-video. She very promptly delivered it to me tonight, and man am I glad she did. The difference is night and day. The video over composite is so bad that it's like somebody smeared vasoline all over the screen. S-video gets it about as good as it's going to be on an SD display (The Wii does 480p, so it would take advantage of an EDTV).

WTF?

This has to be one of the best optical illusions I've ever seen. The person that runs the site has some wacky ideas, but you can ignore that.

So that's what they're called.

I remember doing these puzzles with the Joneses (What is the proper pluralization?) when I was younger. I even resurrected a few for a trip back to Fort Worth from San Antonio. Anyway, Pete pointed me to a site with a bunch of lateral thinking puzzles

For Pete's Sake

Pete was wondering where to buy Euro-games. I recommend Thought Hammer since it's the cheapest I've seen. If you want to look at reviews for board games check out BoardGameGeek.

Suggestions?

Digg

After I wrote that long post about Web 2.0, Richard remarked that he didn't know of any examples of it practice. MovieTally is one, it's essentially the idea that I've been talking about for years, though I don't know how much computation it's really doing.

Digg is a popular example. I tend to ignore the front page, and instead use RSS feeds from some of the subsections. It still gives me a bunch of crap that I don't want, but until they start personalizing that's how it's going to be. Digg also has a neat search feature that allows you to set up a search as an RSS feed. So if you want to keep up on news on a specific topic you can do that.

You can see my diggs here

Movies

The movie block on the right has been wrong. I have seen (at least) one new (to me) movie since August. It was Van Helsing, which was ok, but not great. It's the only movie that I've seen in HD, which I think is sad.

There are a number of reasons why I don't go to movies very often. One is that having to say “One for Harry Potter” is just so embarrassing. Another is that if I'm going to ask someone to go with me, I want to know that I'm not going to waste their time with a lame movie (bad experience when I was in college). Most movies are too big of a gamble.

So, I signed up for Netflix last Thursday, queued up a bunch of movies, and have one in-hand now. That's pretty spiffy. Two movies a month for six bucks ain't bad… and now I sound like a fricking commercial.

Before I signed up I had this idea that there were all these movies I wanted to see, but now I can't think of them. Anyway, the movie that I have now is Ocean's Twelve and my queue looks like this (subject to change):

1. Lady in the Water

2. V for Vendetta

3. Memento

4. Inside Man

5. War of the Worlds

6. Fight Club

…further down I have some classics on the list, because I don't like having to figure out when they're on AMC or whatever.

I can have each movie for two weeks and it won't affect anything so if you'd like to see one of them, let me know and you can borrow it or come over and watch it with me.

I am waiting for the telephone to tell me I'm alive

With all the great TV coming up this season, I'm going to have to find some way to fit it all into my schedule. Maybe I'll finally get around to getting some exercise equipment and multi-task. Anyway…

24 starts up January 14 with two episodes back to back and then two more on Monday. Last season ended kinda lamely, but Rush seems pretty excited about this seasons, so I have hope.

Psych starts up January 19. It's a bit hokey, but fun.

Heroes starts up January 22. Christopher Eccleston is joining the cast, which has me excited. Hopefully he stays longer than he did with Doctor Who.

Speaking of Doctor Who. The Christmas episode has aired, and sometime soon more episodes will be coming up.

Lastly, Mythbusters has a few more episodes coming up soon.

Oh yeah, there's also that Lost thing that starts up on February 7th.

The last few days I was in Texas, we took a trip down to Austin. Our first stop was in Belton, where we got some more wildlife pictures:

Again, I'm cheating. This one was taken in Austin. I think.

You can't see much, but that is an armadillo.

After we got to Austin, we did a little walking downtown:

On our way out of Austin we did a little site-seeing to find the water that we weren't able to find around the city. You can see why we had so much trouble:

We stopped at Inner Space Cavern on the way home:

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