1. Join in the debate over whether or not you need to know C in order to be a real programmer.

2. Talk about the Wii Fit

Lots of people are talking about choice number one. Well, perhaps talking isn’t the right word. Flaming? Fighting? Insulting one’s intellect? Yeah, any of those would do.

But we can bang that one out quick; here I’ll take a stand.

Do you know C? – Yep.

Have you programmed in C? – Double yep.

Have you programmed professionally in C? – Yes.

Would you do it again? – Wouldn’t be my first choice but sure why not?

Do you think programmers should know about pointers and memory management? – Couldn’t hurt them. Not that it makes it any fun though. Screwing that stuff up, and it always gets screwed up, results in errors in fun and terrible ways.

Ok, now that that is out of the way on to the Wii Fit. Thanks to the magic of Amazon pre-orders ours arrived yesterday morning. By the time I made it home from work my wife was actively playing the hula hoop game on the Bluetooth scale board thingie while my three and a half year old daughter was standing three feet to the side making hula hoop motions.

Somehow I think Mario Corp. has a winner here with the new to gaming/super casual gaming crowd.

(And what about the Wii Fit commercial with the woman busting out the Yoga? I’ll bet they sold an extra bazillion units on that alone.)

Now we ran through all the unlocked games and exercises last night, and I doubt that it will cause any kind of gastric bypass like results, but one thing does stand out. The silly thing is fun. Who would have figured, balancing on a couple of scales to roll a virtual ball on a virtual board through a virtual hole is in demand entertainment these days.

We’ll have to see how long it keeps our attention, but I suspect with a couple people in the same house playing it the novelty won’t wear off as fast. In fact, I’ll bet right now my high scores on the balance games are being mercilessly attacked while I am hard at work blogging, err, working.

Oh, and to complete the circle from earlier, like all games it’s probably written in C. So if being a real programmer means writing pseudo-exercise console games it looks like C is indeed required.

Well, it might also be C++, but that’s really just C with a compiler messages that read like you strangled a cat.

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My daughter will turn four years old this September and quite by accident I’ve discovered that she enjoys Pac-Mac World 2 for the original Xbox. We “played” for the first time when I de-cluttering the house and found the old Xbox stashed away in a box. She was curious what it was, Pac-Man was really the only non-sports game that was even remotely appropriate for her age, and I needed a break.

What a mistake.

It turns out she loved “playing” it with me. I keep using quotation marks because “playing” means me using the live controller while she holds the other controller that does nothing, and makes excited statements of “Daddy get that coin!” or “Oooh. A cherry!” that only a preschooler can make. The real kick in the head is that she found out about the unlockable bonus games, including the original Ms. Pac-Man. So lately when she’s been good all day we’ve broken out the game to go searching for all 180 stupid coins we need to unlock a game from 1981.

Luckily for me a surprising bright spot has suddenly appeared. It’s a metaphoric parting of the clouds, a star on the horizon, or perhaps a comp’d breakfast at the casino. It’s my wife mentioning, “Do you know anything about Wii Fit?”

Score. Grant just stumbled onto a power pellet.

Thanks to clever yoga based marketing, the kid friendliness of Nintendo, and a slant toward casual gaming that my wife would be on board with I suddenly found myself looking for a Nintendo Wii. Unfortunately, so is everyone else.

Now at this point I could have gone one of five ways.

Way #1: Drive all around creation to brick and mortar stores looking for a Wii.

Way #2: Call all around creation to brick and mortar stores asking if they had a Wii.

Way #3: Park a browser window on Amazon’s Wii page and keep hitting refresh until they came in stock.

Way #4: Play the game of market price “Is it actually going to get shipped to me/Hopefully it is a real Wii in the box and not a broken NES” roulette that is eBay.

Way #5: Put the Internet to work for me through the novel service that has sprung up to deal with Wii shortages: wiialerts.com

It was Jonathan that tipped me off to wiialerts and considering that nothing bad had happened to him when he used it I gave it a whirl. The short story is that it worked EXACTLY LIKE IT WAS SUPPOSED TO. I’m not entirely sure how they are set up to work with the monitoring of different retailers but I suspect it is some manner of web service consumption along with screen scraping where necessary. The site itself seems to be written in PHP, but then again what isn’t these days.

Regardless, I just signed up, entered my contact info (email and cell number) set up some alerts on the exact items I wanted, and the next day got a text message telling me Toys R US had it in. Two minutes later my transaction was complete. Three minutes after that they were sold out.

I write about software quality a lot. Actually I write about it all the time. Thus I’m always thrilled when I stumble across a product or service that gets it right and does what it claims. The Wii just arrived yesterday and I haven’t shown it to my daughter yet although I suspect the prospect of waggling a stick at the TV will be a big hit.

So if you are in the market for a Wii definitely check these guys out, it absolutely works. If you are writing some kind of web application also check these guys out. Simple, clean, and works, those are very good traits to copy. Now if only Ms. Pac-Man was on the Wii Virtual Console life would be complete…

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