Amazon sent an email a while ago telling us all who signed up for it that they'd be opening orders for the Wii on "Sunday morning (PST)". After failing to obtain a Wii from the neighboring towns, I decided to camp out in the comfort of my bedroom... All night. I downloaded an add-on for Firefox that automatically refreshes pages. I set it for 30 seconds and the amused myself for the remainder of the night. All night. I eventually retired to rest in my bed, but I didn't actually sleep until, maybe... 7 or so, and it was only for a few minutes.

I was too excited to sleep, for one thing. I mean, come on... The Wii was released! Also, I think onions really have it in for me, because my stomach wasn't feeling too well after we ate. So a stomach ache combined with excitement produces a giddy sick feeling. So, in short, I couldn't sleep, so I waited and watched Amazon refresh... Always looking for that 1-Click Purchase button to appear.

I even began to rig up a camera monitor for it, too. I'd focus the camera on the portion of the page that would change when they opened up the orders, and when it noticed movement, it would sound a nice alarm from the computer speakers. Well, it worked well during the test, because the page would reload without any movement. Unfortunately, Amazon must have started really raking in the page visitors, because the page started loading a lot slower and it would always clear the page and redisplay everything when it reloaded... Which registered as movement and set off the alarm. So that didn't work.

Did a I get a Wii from my camping? Nope! I debated on whether or not to go to church because I still felt a little squeamish from stomach ache, but I would have felt guilty if I ditched church to stare at an Amazon page for a game console. So I went to church. Well, I get back from church and Amazon had opened it up while I was gone and had apparently sold out in under 2 minutes. Oh well. No way I was going to miss church. A bit ticked off, I was, of course, but oh well.

So then I spend the rest of the day tracking down Wii quantity information and prices and out-of-way store locations. I didn't really find much... Until I visited Sam's Club again for like... the seventeenth time. They already had a Wii item entry for a pre-order set that sold out a long time ago. That one was no good... So I decided to search for Twilight Princess to see if they at least have games I could get and cut down on how much I had to hunt down in town. No Twilight Princess alone, but it dumped me at a new Wii item entry that had Twilight Princess and Madden NFL 2007 bundled with a Wii. No discount, unfortunately, but it was active and I could add it to my cart!

But nooo. Sam's Club was taunting me. It had the Add To Cart button, but whenever I clicked it, it would say the item wasn't available and to try again later or call customer service. Yeah. They actually tried to make me call customer service. Haha! Well, so I go off and browse around other stores and periodically come back to check Sam's Club.

Suddenly, I hit the Add To Cart button and IT GETS DUMPED IN MY SHOPPING CART. Finally! The time has come! There was no time for second guessing! Luckily, having set up my membership account ahead of time, a lot of my shipping information was automatically filled in. Selected credit card payment, 7 to 10 day shipping because they were charging extravagant prices for faster shipping, and hit Checkout!

I breathed a nervous sigh of relief (if there's such a thing) and checked out the bundle for exactly what I was going to get. Uh oh. The Add To Cart button was gone and replaced with a big ol' red OUT OF STOCK. I check my order. It's still "In Process". Then, I get an order confirmation from them in my email inbox. So far, it seems I was able to just barely squeeze in an order for the Wii from Sam's Club online.

So... That's my Wii experience, and it ain't over, yet. If by Black Friday I don't get any further notifications or progress indicators from Sam's Club (never bought from them, so I have no idea how fast they'll ship or how good they are at keeping track of inventory), then my plan is to call some stores and find out when they're getting another shipment and then plan on running in as early as possible.

Hopefully, though, Sam's Club is a decent shipper and this will work out. They charged me tax, so hopefully that means they have a warehouse in Indiana and the 7 to 10 day shipping will still only be about 2 to 3 days. By luck, I'll still have a Wii by Thanksgiving and I can amuse myself while the family is over. Er... I mean... Uhm... Amuse the family when they're over! We're getting together with our friends on Friday, and I really want it by then, but it ultimately doesn't matter.

So... Tonight we went to a restaurant where a quartet from our church was going to sing. Got there right before people started pouring in to get ready for the little mini-concert thingie. (What the... spellchecker doesn't recognize "thingie"? Pfft.) Anyway, the restaurant is really awesome... I'd give you the name, but then you'd be able to stalk me, and I don't know who reads this and I'd prefer not to be stalked so I'm not going to name it! Haha! I ordered onions on my hamburger... Which was a bad idea. I used to be able to eat onions whenever I wanted, but now they give me headaches.

Speaking of food, I think I'm allergic the wheat chex, too. I had a couple of bowls of them in the past two weeks, and I got sick with what felt like a fever and headache... I'm not sure if I was coming down with something, instead, though. This merits further investigation.

Anyway, then I bought the CDs they had available. Always wanted them, but I've never been in the fix place at the right time to get them... But I got them TONIGHT! Bwahaha.

Then... The Wii. We ran to... bigger nearby town. First stop, Best Buy... People lined up with enough quilts to use as a rope ladder to climb to the top of the building. With extra quilts left over to use to keep warm... Lots of quilts. Tons and tons of quilts. So we go inside and ask the welcomer guy how many Wiis they have. He ALMOST tells us, but he ended up not telling us because it was against the rules. I would tell you what town this was, but I don't want to get this guy in trouble for thinking about breaking rules. (You know how evil Best Buy is.)

So I go, "well... there's only about 8 people lined up. We could wait here!" But then someone pulls up and yells out "hey! Does this store open at midnight?" and someone yelled back "no! They open at 9," and the other guy goes "woooooah!" (So do I, actually, but not out loud.) 9am opening? No thanks! So we go to Walmart. Gargantuan line... 40 people maybe. No possible luck there. Next? Meijer! Line was inside... Really small line. Yey! Not really... They only had 8 units to sell... Stupid Meijer.

So then we go to the lesser of the two nearby towns. A really economically dead town. The Walmart line here was lots smaller and inside. Yey! Not really... We were a few minutes too late and when they handed out numbers, they didn't give us any. So we left and came back home. No Wii for us. One of the guys up at the front of the line offered us his Wii for $450, though, because he bought a PS3 for his son when that was released and he had no money to buy games. I laughed at the guy (in my mind) for being such a sucker, and told him we weren't prepared to dish out that much money for a console.

I thought we might try Sam's Club tomorrow, but I don't really want to... I don't think a Wii is worth getting there at 5am and then rushing to church. I think my new plan is to buy the games separately from Amazon or somewhere... Extra controllers and all the extra accessories I want, then hunt for a Wii and just a Wii and not worry about the store not having everything else I want.

Personally, I can wait. Not very long... I could wait until Christmas, but January is a bit long. I could survive, though... I still have NaNoWriMo to get done. I've been slowing down... But I at least get my daily word requirement. I currently have Amazon Wii page on auto refresh, so maybe... MAYBE... With divine intervention, I can snag a Wii this week.

In happier news, it's only 4 days until the Wii comes out!

...and I should have 30,000 words by tonight. Better get that wrapped up.

What a complete idiot. Someone at IGN blogged about the graphics quality of the Nintendo Wii. (I offer the link merely as a source. If you don't believe me about what he says (as some of you have a habit of doing) then go ahead and click, but I don't recommend it, since he uses some creepy language.)

In a nutshell, the Wii ships with composite cables. Video on one cable, audio on one cable (sometimes two these days). Pretty poor quality, yes, which is why I'll be picking up a component cable. (Video on three cables, audio on two cables, tons better.) So this guy at IGN claims they all gathered around to watch someone play the new console on the block... and "the collected masses collectively vomited." He told us that Twilight Princess and Excite Truck looked really, really horrible and they wondered why Nintendo would ever ship the console without the better cables.

He then tells us to buy cables which he tells us are going to only be available online and be really hard to find. WRONG! IGN themselves released an official article concerning this. Good ol' Perrin Kaplan told us that the component cables will be available online AND in major retail stores such as Circuit City, GameStop and Best Buy. So someone at IGN didn't even bother to read up on the latest Wii news. Wonderful. Component cables hard to find? I think not.

Next he tells us to invest in a nasty TV if we can't find an overpriced $30 component cable. What a joke. How about we invest in a better TV than yours? If composite video looks terrible on your HDTV, then the upscaling is the problem, not the Wii. We've all seen the comparisons, Mister IGN Guy, and it's not nearly as bad as you make it out to be.

To seal the deal, he says his interest in the Wii dropped 20% and that the first two hours of Twilight Princess "= Zzzzzzz..." Of course, this is from the guys who seem to actively revolt against games that aren't purely blood n' guts flying around. Zelda is an adventure game, of course IGN isn't going to like it.

Anyway, now let's clear some things up. This article has got some people ticked off, because they're blindly following the opinion of some overreacting creep from a major game news site. He's right, the Wii doesn't come with component cables. But he's wrong... they'll be easy to find in major retail stores AND on Nintendo's store online. But before you go whining about shelling out the extra cash on a component cable that should have been included, let's take a look at the other consoles.

From what I've been able to glean, the low-end Xbox 360 does NOT include component cables. It, too, includes composite. The high-end 360 does, in fact, seem to come with component cables. The PlayStation 3, however, doesn't appear to come with ANY advanced video cables and both packages come with only a composite video cable. So what does this mean?

The PS3, which Sony heralds as THE high definition console to buy doesn't even offer HD cables! A $600 console that's built from the ground up to offer HD video doesn't come with HD video cables. Hmm.

The $299 Xbox360 doesn't come with HD video cables. The $399 version does. The Xbox is also heralded as a high definition gaming console, but to a slightly lesser extent than the degree Sony's been hyping up the PS3.

The $249 Nintendo Wii does NOT come with HD video cables, but also isn't designed to support HD. It comes with a composite cable because it's cheaper and Nintendo realizes that lots of people still don't have an HDTV capable of using component cables. Nintendo is, however, selling component cables separately and you can probably get them at the store you're lining up in front of to get the Wii in the first place.

So tell me, why can Sony and Microsoft not release HD video cables with their HD consoles, and yet Nintendo gets the flak for NOT including HD video cables with their console that does NOT support HD video. (Please note that using HD cables with the Wii will dramatically increase the sharpness of the image, but not necessarily allow HD video.)

Yes, I am biased for Nintendo. But because I'm biased doesn't necessarily mean I'm wrong.

Wii Launch: T-10 days and counting...

NaNoWriMo Finish: T-6 days and counting...

I'm pretty much on schedule, barring any writer's block...

So, it's late, and I've been walking around town for... hmm... seven? Eight hours? I didn't get any writing done, and I'm tired, but I'll be darned if I go to sleep without blogging THIS. After months of saving and researching and planning and... stuff... my eBay job boss told me about some shop he gets stuff from sometimes that sells new TVs for cheapish. So I thought, hey, why not go in and see what this guy's got? I've got to do some banking, and Mom wanted that special hair conditioner that was on sale, and wanted me to get that dog food that was on sale. (For our dog... not me...) So my bro' and I decided to take a trip.

Well... that guy my boss was talking about DID sell TVs, but I think they MIGHT have been new about seven years ago. I was ticked off. We got lost going there, we got lost coming back. We weren't happy. I especially wasn't happy because I'd (perhaps foolishly) gotten my hopes up. Ah well. Back to the original game plan. I needed to go to town to get the layout of the stores for National Wii Day and see what everyone had as far as TVs went. Best Buy first. Great googley moogley, the selection of TVs they have. Expensive, geez, but they had tons and tons and tons of TVs. LCDs... CRTs... Plasmas... Rear-Projection... Expensive, though. So that was a no-go. Got a good glimpse of the sizes and colors, though, even though they were factory-tuned and looked nasty in some cases. Actually, I take that back. I found one really nice, really cheap Magnavox 32" LCD HDTV. It was on sale for just today and was begging to be purchased. I debated getting it right then and there, but decided against it and left to check out the other stores first.

After that, we went to a midwest store chain called HHGregg. I guess the New York and New Jersey doesn't have these. I know Indiana and Ohio do. I know it's not a national chain, but it's still nice. Anyway, the customer service folks mill around and help you pick things out. I didn't remember that at first and I really didn't like the help, but he turned out to be more helpful than they usually are. He directed us to two sets. The same Magnavox 32" LCD HDTV we saw at Best Buy, and a Westinghouse 32" LCD HDTV for $100 less than the Magnavox sale price at Best Buy. (It wasn't on sale at HHGregg.) He ran over the connectivity features and what it lacks. It doesn't have an over-the-air HD tuner, which I just remembered there on the spot that we live in a dead-air area. We need an amplifier to pick ANYTHING up. We hardly ever have clear antenna channels, so over-the-air HD channels definitely wouldn't work here. So I just shaved off some mega-bucks right there. No Magnavox. Nice, so we've got a Westinghouse candidate. My friend said he's heard nice things about them, and I trust him, so it was a major possibility. Okay, we told the guy we'd go to Sam's Club next and check there before making a decision.

So then we ran off to Sam's Club, which is literally in the next parking lot from Gregg's, secured a membership for good ol' Wii Day, took a quick glance at their horrible selection of TVs, browsed the games and tried to estimate where the Wii would be placed. Quickly got bored and left. Back to HHGregg and that nice little Westinghouse HDTV. By that time, I was getting tired and we'd been to all the specialty stores. I already knew Wal-Mart's selection of TVs by heart. Nothing ever worth buying.

After about half an hour, we'd secured ourselves a brand new 32" 720p LCD HDTV with a 3-year extended warranty and were merrily on our way to Steak n Shake for a celebration. But oh crap! We needed component cables! You know, those things that actually make HDTVs work in high definition! Argh. Okay. Wal-Mart's right here, too, so let's look there real quick since Sam's Club didn't have any and HHGregg didn't carry any video game stuff. Bah! Wal-Mart carried S-Video, but not component. WHY?! Nobody knows. I run back to the van and decide to head to Radio Shack, which is in the same mall as Best Buy. All this time, my brother's in the van, playing Mario Kart DS and rockin' out to Weird Al on my iPod. So we get to Radio Shack, I run in, ask if they have component cables for PS2 and Xbox... They don't know. We walk back, see nothing... I'm running back out to the van. Oh, hey! Best Buy's like... RIGHT THERE. Okay, so I run in there while we're here. If there's nothing here, I'm calling it quits and buying the cable for uber-cheap on the internet. I run in, same guy greets me who greeted me last time I was there. I run back to the video game section, do a quick browse... Do a second quick browse. AHA! A combination cable! Connect your PS2 AND Xbox up to your TV with the same cable. For cheaper than I found online! Bingo! I run to the cash register, check out... Deny a request to try a free subscription of Time magazine (yeah, you go try selling me liberal news junk, Best Buy) and I was out the door. HDTV... component connectors. I'm happy... I'm in heaven. We go to Steak n Shake.

Now... I probably built you all up for a horrible time at Steak n Shake, but, actually, it was really nice, as always. Except for the worrying someone was gonna swipe all our new stuff. Dog food, conditioner, HDTV, iPod, Nintendo DS... Major money in that van, man. Especially the dog food. (Oh, speaking of which, I haven't blogged about that news...) Steak n Shake is always cool. We eat there a lot when we actually DO eat out. Steak n Shake and Subway. The two staple food sources. Except... There was one quirk with Steak n Shake tonight. One of the cooks in the back... Was singing the theme song to Elmo's World, while some horrible 60s rock band was playing over the radio. Yes. Elmo's World. It was a big guy singing it, too. We heard them briefly discussing the Tickle Me Elmo, too. Don't ask me why.

Anyway... yeah. New HDTV. Wii in about 12 days. I'm going to be so broke. Oh, and you can click the banner image to see a nice big ol' image, too. Okami looks awesome on it. Halo 2, too. Can't wait for Halo 3 to put it through the real tests. That comes lots later, thank goodness. I have no money. I need to recuperate during the Christmas season eBay sales.

So I'm ticking off the seconds until the Nintendo Wii is released on November 19th. Mark your calendars everyone! It's going to be a mad rush to the shops at midnight to be the first to pick one up. Having been unable to secure a preorder, I've begun to work on some plans to make a trip to my nearby city.

We've got Wal-Mart, Meijer, Target, Sears, Sam's Club, Best Buy and EBGames. Hopefully one of these stores will have one for sweet little ol' me. (Probably not EBGames, though.) I'm a bit strapped for money at the moment, so I think I'm only going to pick up Zelda: Twilight Princess and Excite Truck for now. Maybe just Zelda, since I still have to get an HDTV.

Yeah... I just realized today that I have two weeks to shop for a TV and for to get here if it's an online purchase. I think I've picked one out. The Samsung LN-S2738D 27" Widescreen LCD HDTV. It's nice and cheap (relatively speaking) for a 720p set, which is all I want/need right now. I don't really want to spend a whole lot on a 720p set and turn around in a couple of years and get a 1080p set. Hopefully someone in my family will help me front the costs for it so I can get it early, and then pay them back. I think I might have to get the thing online and have it shipped here. Nobody carries this model anymore. All these stores have to carry the latest and greatest... You know there ARE people out here who don't want the latest and greatest and most-wallet-busting stuff!

I think I might plan ahead and get myself a Sam's Club membership before the 19th. They say Sam's Club is a great place to find new consoles because while everyone's lining up outside Best Buy, Sam's Club sits empty because the membership system keeps people from just walking in off the street.

So... Nintendo Wii... extra controller... Zelda and maybe Excite Truck... 27" widescreen HDTV... all on or before the 19th. In the meantime, I've got a novel to write. Which, I have to admit, I've only got about 200 words written today. Not exactly the 5,000 words I'd planned on, since I had an icky night's sleep last night. (I think it was the pizza.) But yeah... I'm gonna try to write some more before early sleep-time.