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Wow that was tough but I in fact got a little bit of luck and one of the guys that I work with ran across a Wii. The family will be excited on Christmas morning, hell I am excited. But there are a few take aways that I hope will help others.

First make sure that you are looking online for what is available and when and where. I looked for my Wii here in Canada at  Console Watch. Console Watch keeps updating the major online stores every 30 seconds so when there is a chance that using that site that you can run into an online deal.

Next was definitely Red Flag Deals. Red Flag has all sorts of deals and conversations in their forums. sign up and you can get tips on where the Wii is here in Canada.

Finally getting to know that managers in the various stores and you may be able to get a call from a friendly EB Games or  WalMart or even Shoppers Drug mart video department manager

Good luck to everyone looking for a Wii this Christmas. I hope the damn scalpers don’t end up profiting on this great game device this Christmas.

Well the kids have decided that they want a Wii this Christmas. I was able to avoid it last year even though I was involved with the searches of a few people and with all of that craziness, but now I guess I will have to get involved with the lunacy that is Wii shopping here in Canada.

If you did not know it already, I live in Calgary and have never had to personally go through this “Hot Christmas Toy” shopping so if anyone has any Wii shopping tips for me I would really appreciate it. I will try to track my shopping and give as many hints as possible over the next few days and weeks

So now that Amazon has released the Kindle e-book reader you have to wonder if other manufacturers are going to start either screaming, becuase Amazon kind of owns the book market, or furiously pushing out new ebook readers. Right now the only other ebook reader of note is the Sony ebook reader and it has almost no market penetration.

Amazon is really one of the kings of hype and that seems to spill out everywhere. Business Week magazine is calling the Kindle the ebook version of an Ipod and although it looks nothing like an Ipod the white color of this thing has to make you think about Ipods (no plans for an apple reader yet though).

The Kindle offers really great resolution, EVDO, holds a hundred or so books out of the 88,000 book library that Amazon offers and is great for reading Word Documents, newspapers, and even blogs. The Kindle is $399 and is likely to sell a ton of copies this Christmas season.

The wireless connectivity with the Kindle is handled completely  by Amazon so unlike Apple products there is no wireless charges for using the Kindle to hook up to Amazon to buy books.

Click through this link and you can even see a six minute long video of the Kindle in action including a bit of a commercial from Amazon

A couple of years ago I tried to do the national novel writing month contest. The contest does not really have judged winners and losers but it is actually a month long race in November to try to write a 50,000 word novel. Thousands of people try and quite a few actually do complete it. This year I was smart enough to know that I would not be able to find enough time to write 5o,000 words in the month for my novel “Hooker”.

I still look at the message boards at the Nanowrimo site occasionally and found a neat couple of pieces of free writing software.

The first piece of freeware is called Q10 and after either installing or running the portable version of Q10 you get a black screen that just has plain type on ot. This is a full screen text editor and it designed to be simple and uncluttered. The great thing about Q10 is that it has absolutely no distractions, not even menus. To find out how to use it you need to get the keyboard shortcuts by pressing the F1 key while running the software.

One other great thing about Q10 is that you can drop some sounds in there that are supplied on the website and these will allow you to have electric typewriter sounds while you are typing. I have not heard these sounds in years so it was really great to use.

The second piece of freeware that I found is called YWriter3 this software is for storyboarding and scene creation when you are writing a story or novel. I checked out YWriter last year and it was OK but this new version is even better. You can imagine if I am mentioning a piece of storyboarding freeware on a tech blog that it must be good to mention. If you are writing or want to write a book I think that YWriter is probably indespensible.

I have played with Google Reader for a while now and although great News is a great feed reader as well as RSS Owl I keep thinking that bloglines or Google Reader would be the way to go so that I can access my RSS feeds from different computers at home, work or on the road.

First of all I was able to get to Google Reader in Firefox just by typing google reader in the address bar. Next I was able to export my feeds from Great News as a OPML file and then Google Reader allowed me to import the feeds along with their categories that I have spent so much time setting up.

Now I have my feeds and a way to access them. Google has also offered some keyboard shortcuts for Google Reader so theat I can get around the app a bit faster by stating away from the mouse a bit.

The great thing now is that I can look at all of the unread articles from the feeds that I am following and  after reading them all I can mark them that way and next time I am at a web browser I can see all of my newly unread articles.

Google Reader is a very fast and easy way to keep up with all of the news that hte blogs find fit to read.

It seems like it has been years now since Google has had any serious competition as the top search engine. I find that almost 80% of my traffic comes from Google and we all know that the Google Algorithm is great, most of the top results seem good but now we should be expecting more I think.

The only reason that I use Yahoo nowadays is to get sports scores, one of the really nice things on Yahoo is that you can do a search for your sports team and it will show you recent scores and next and previous games above the search results. Google could do this as well but they don’t.

MSN to me, or live as it is now called, does nothing. I find the interface fine but there is not much that draws me to live.com at all.

Google is of course the king of search engines and have great operators like asking the time, getting movie showtimes and even local weather over the search results.

So why do I expect more? Well the internet is not static and even though there are pages and pages created everyday I do not get a feeling for the ebb and flow of news. I go to Digg to get the latest tech and geeky news, I go to various news tracking sites like Techmeme or TailRank or even Newsvine but Google does not seem to be able to do any of this for me.

Perhaps I expect to much from a search engine. A search engine is for finding answers. A portal will only give me the news that I am looking for. And what I want is trends in real time of what the world in general and internet in particular are looking for, at and talking about