Peaeater

Now that my Wii has shipped, I feel I can blog about how I got it without jinxing myself.

First of all, this Wii was supposed to be my Christmas present, and now it's the end of March, which tells you how it difficult it has been to get one. Either that or the one about Santa doing all the world's chimneys in a single night is beeloney.

At first, naif that I was, I called all the stores around town on a semi-regular basis. "Hello, do you have the Wii in stock?" Weary "no's" were my answer, time and again. Two months of that approach proved fruitless, so I turned to the only power in this world that could help me: technology. Heck, I would have turned to religion, I would, if I thought there was an outside chance God would have three seconds to turn aside from answering all the prayers about famine, pestilence, and lost kittens. It's not his fault - you people are clogging up the request lines with your frickin' demands for grace at mealtimes. Seriously, do you think it matters that the next bite you stuff down your craw is unblessed? Fine, you're thankful, but the resulting DoS attack is the reason for multiplied human suffering around the world. Save it for when it counts.

Aaaaanyway... If you want a Wii short of a miracle, here's what you do.

1. Subscribe to a Wii tracker with an RSS feed. I used http://www.xpbargains.com/tracker.php/wii_canada. These trackers regularly ping online stores to see if any Wii have suddenly appeared in the inventory.
2. You need to be alerted when a Wii shows up. KlipFolio can be set to monitor the Wii tracker feed every couple of minutes, and play a sound and/or a desktop alert when the feed changes.
3. Set up "quick checkout" accounts at all the online stores the tracker is tracking. You will need every second.

I tried using Yahoo Alerts to do the same thing, because Yahoo Alerts can send a text msg to your cell phone, but Yahoo Alerts only check every 30 minutes at most, and by that time, the Wiis are all sold out. I kept the cell phone next to me 24 hours a day and after getting half a dozen alerts that were too late I got very angry. Especially at the ones that woke me up at 5:30 in the morning. I should have had an inkling when the first cell phone alert caught me driving, and I vroomed to the nearest library, ran in and tried to use a public terminal to purchase a Wii and missed one by about a minute. (Inventory showed 3 in stock when I started checking out, but were gone before I could complete.)

All water under the bridge now, because the Wii is on its way.