I ordered a Nintendo Wii a few weeks ago, and it finally shipped. Thanks to the miracle of the internet, I can tell that it left Dallas at 8:34PM yesterday, and arrived in LA at 7:00 this morning. Currently it’s “Out for delivery”, meaning it’s on the brown truck, somewhere in Santa Monica.

My UPS guy got tired of waiting for us to come to the door, so he’d just knock and run, leaving his deliveries on the doormat. Recently he does not even bother to knock, just leaving the packages, so we often only discover there has been a delivery when we walk the dogs at night.

But if there’s something I’m looking forward to, I could go and look outside the door, but instead, I just refresh the UPS query. Yup, instead of walking twenty feet to see if something is there, I get my computer to ask a computer in Mawah, NJ, to tell it all it has been told by the computers in Dallas, Ontario, Los Angeles, and a computer in a truck somewhere in LA.

And it’s actually easier. Here, one click, in five seconds I know exactly where my Wii has been, and that it’s not on my doormat. I marvel now at this new technology, but soon it will be as accepted as cellphones were – or a better example: trains.

[later] …. And eventually, I checked the page, it told me the package had arrived, I open the door, and there it is! Wiiii!