Boy, do I feel like a big idiot (or “shidiot” if you know Mr. Leahy). I have had the Wii for almost a year now and I only found out yesterday that it has a wireless connection built into it. Evidently, I’m not a big gamer otherwise I would have known that. I was thinking it had an ethernet port on the back but I must have been confused. Anyway, since my Wii sits on the other side of my living room, opposite of my computer, I never bothered to connect it to the ‘Net since I thought I needed an ethernet cable. Besides, my kids weren’t too interested in that anyway. They use to hop online with their PlayStation but rarely do that anymore.

So I was chatting with my brother-in-law yesterday, who maybe has had his Wii for 13 seconds before connecting his to the Internet, when he dropped the bombshell. Cripes! I thought for a moment that he had a special model because I was pretty sure that mine didn’t have wifi. Let’s just say that I was way off of the mark. Thanks Jer. My forehead is bruised from smacking it on the table.

So what did I do after I connected the Wii to my wireless network? Downloaded Opera of course. Now I can surf the web from my couch. I must say that watching YouTube on my TV is a neat experience. I even checked out some of Richard’s Inkscape tutorials on YouTube. They play great. Unfortunately our screencasters videos are a bit much for it. They do not stream well. Perhaps I need a slightly bigger pipe to pull down our higher res flash videos.

I’m sure this new “Web TV” will wear off after awhile but at least it was fun for a couple of hours last night. Next time I’ll peruse the directions. Pft!