You bought your kids the Wii and paid $450, and talked to a friend that found a great deal on the Wii for $350.

Doh!

It happens to all of us at some point or another, especially after Cyber Monday and Black Friday.  Not all of us are cut out to get up at 3am to get to a store that opens at 4 am so that we can swarm the aisles looking for the single Wii listed for $75 on the shelves somewhere in the store.  I just saw a news report and Ebay is selling the Wii on average for $411 about $100 over suggested retail price, but good luck winning that auction!

Most of us, hear about the great deals after its too late.

That’s why you will now find many more sites that do not actually sell products, but help you find the great deals that are ‘really’ out there.

Here’s is an example, its called TechBargains.com and they provide information for where the latest tech deals are and what those deals look like.  They give information for both online and bricks and mortars stores from Best Buy to Tiger Direct and even some direct buys from the manufacturers themselves. 

Now the site is not a shopping cart system, so do not expect to see some ooh’s and ahhhhs type of layouts with web 2.0 buttons.  This site is designed to give you powerful knowledge to save a lot of money when you shop, without having to waste a lot of time on research.  So if you are looking for a discount computers, or a Wii or a GPS unit or whatever, you can search here, but the stuff isn’t the reason why you go here. 

The reason why you would use a pre-shopping service like TechBargains.com is to allow them to scout out the deals for you.  Now, not all retailers give a flat discount off their prices to get you in the doors.  Some will give free shipping to your house, some will give free shipping to the closest store to your house and some will give a $40 rebate or some other incentive.

Using a pre-shopping scouting service like this you can look for the gizmo you want and then find the type of good feel, good deal that is right for you.

Plus, for those of you that are feed savvy, if you do not see the deal you are looking for today, you can sign up for alerts.  Then when say, Best Buy launches a sale in the middle of the week, or Tiger Direct gets a shipment of refurbished gadgets Thursday night, you can receive an email alert or a rss feed alert that the deal for the gadget you are hoping to buy is moving somewhere in some new way.

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Years ago when I was working away to college, I had a job doing data entry for the Postal Service.  I would go school all-day, and head to the to the Postal Service to type all night.  I do my homework in between breaks, and I listen to audio books all night long.  I learned how to perform mundane repetitive physical tasks while letting my mind engage in higher-level activities.

After he got out of school and went to work in the corporate world I rapidly put on about 20 pounds as I sat behind a desk and drove a keyboard full time (8 hours of meetings per day didn’t help either).  All that physical inactivity got me after a while and decreased by ability to enjoy the higher-level work was doing in the office.

Now I’m wondering if there might be some way to allow people to get the physical gratification of a little repetitive physical labor while they multitask at higher-level items.  Our brains are capable of quite a bit and so our bodies and the tech revolution in some ways has not allowed our bodies to keep up with what our brains are performing every day.  The evolution of the Wii gaming device takes a baby step in the direction of giving our bodies a little more action.

  But maybe our bodies don’t have to be engaged in the actual higher-level work.  I was watching a crazy video on YouTube the other day that gave me a peculiar thought. 

The video was of a news reporter performing an interview with a lady that stomps grapes for a living.  You can picture Lucille Ball in a famous episode where she’s stomping on grapes to make wine or something like that.  This YouTube videos is actuallyl famous because the news reporter gives it a try herself.  She tries to give the interview while she’s in a bucket of grapes stomping on them barefooted.

Unfortunately she has a little trouble multitasking and ends up stumbling out of the bucket of grapes and crashes several feet to the ground where from the noise of the YouTube video it appears that she is seriously injured possibly mortally wounded.

She wasn’t able to multitask an interview while grape stomping,  however, I suspect that a person working on the computer raised up to a counter top level could possibly drum out a few e-mails while they were stomping grapes. 

Now I suspect that there’s not a great deal of need for grape stompers throughout the world, but that’s not really the point.  The point is that people need a little bit more physical engagement while they’re working.  A simple solution might be to just dump everybody onto an elliptical machine or a treadmill or some sort of stationary bicycle device, however that’s not exactly improving productivity. 

So maybe those devices can be hooked up to some sort of electricity generating machine that helps the environment, or maybe they could even be tied to some form of production whether it’s creating wine or shucking corn or something.

Physically it needs to be something that doesn’t require a lot of brain power(like writing this blog doesn’t), and it can not be too dangerous either.  You wouldn’t want to break an ankle or cut off a finger or something like that while you’re typing an e-mail.  However if we can find someway to allow our bodies to catch up to our brains and at the same time increase productivity, our economy would be better, our worker satisfaction might increase along with possibly of our salaries.  Plus our physical well-being and overall sense of balance would likely benefit as well. 

Who knows, maybe I could move to Italy and rent me one of those spectacular Villas in Italy and set up shop as a web designing, blog writing, grape stomper!

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You may not stop the subscription to Wired, The Wall Street Journal or Maxim anytime soon, but Nintendo is hoping that you will catch some news on their new Wii News channel and service that will go through the popular gaming device.

Nintendo is launching the service today that will provide news stories in many different languages but primarily sourced from the Associated Press through the Wii devices.

I guess that leaves the question for all of us, Will Wii read the news more or not?

Technorati tags: Nintendo, Wii, Associated Press, Wii News Service

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