Weapons of Mass Distraction

Having trouble getting your laptop fixed today? You’re not alone. Blizzard Entertainment took a massive digital dump on IT departments all over the country today with its 12:00AM release of Wrath of the Lich King, which is the latest installment in the massively mutliplayer online timewaster World of Warcraft.

The outbreak of productivity drain will follow the same pattern of “Prequelitis“, the phenomenon which gripped IT departments when so many IT guys called in sick the day after a midnight showing of The 1999 Star Wars prequel movie The Phantom Menace.

In other words, today is basically the day after a night binge drinking. For geeks.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a Death Knight to create.

The Election on the Web

As we head towards the final election countdown (a few hours to close as I write this), I figured it would be fun to share some of the available election resources on the web. Now you too can be a CNN-style, magic-map election tracker.. the web makes it easy.

A number of election news coverage sites are available catering to both “left” and “right” points of view, as well as the global microblog conversations on Twitter. However if you prefer to avoid the chatter and draw up your own “what if” scenarios, you’ll likely enjoy using the web electoral collage maps tracking tools available. In particular, 270 to Win, Electoral Vote, and CNN’s Electoral calculator allow you to draw up your own. Below are two possible “what if scenarios:

An Electoral College Split (269 Obama,  269 McCain)

My Guess (Obama 317, McCain 221)

Update 8:06 PM PST: The major news networks are calling Obama the new President elect. An old Chinese proverb comes to mind: “may you live in interesting times”. Congratulations to our new President.