Configure wget to use a proxy server

I was playing with Ubuntu at work the other day and need to use wget to get some updates. But it wasn’t working because I was behind a proxy server. Now I had set the environment variables HTTP_PROXY and FTP_PROXY up so I though it should work.
But apparently that’s not all you need to do. You also need to add the following line to you  ~/.wgetrc file:

http_proxy = http://donut.unet.brandeis.edu:3128/
use_proxy = on
wait = 15

vi wget and the proxy server.