Have I missed the boat?

According to Joel Spolsky in his article on hiring programmers, the best programmers are usually "never on the job market" because they get snapped up on an internship and get a permanent position. He says that "there are people out there who appear to be applying to every job on Monster.com" which essentially apply for everything they see.

Which is pretty much what I did when I graduated. I started off at first just applying for some internships or jobs at companies that I would have liked to work at (and were in Montreal, that being where I wanted to live) such as Google or Ubisoft. They had their summer of code things, or other internships that I unfortunately didn't really know about until my third year of university, after I had a research position which somewhat ruled out a summer internship and didn't benefit my resume at all. I didn't really hear any response from these companies so I started applying for some other jobs that I might be interested in. From the ones who did respond, it was the whole "we're looking for someone with experience" even though it directly stated on my resume that I was in my last year of university. How am I supposed to get professional experience while in university? Anyway I ended up going to Monster and just applying for anything remotely interesting. That actually got me interviews, however the one job that I actually did end up getting was through a friend of a friend, so it shows how effective Monster.com is for finding a job.

Maybe I'm just a shitty programmer, or am one of those people who think they know what they're doing but actually have no idea. I'm hoping this is not the case. Basically at this point I feel like I've missed the boat on applying for one of these great summer internships I'm finding, and am stuck working at mediocre jobs that don't allow me enough time to hack around on interesting things (except maybe a rare exception).