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The Democrats take the House. Claire McCaskill defeats Jim Talent for Missouri Senate. All but one Missouri state amendments and propositions win (Amendment 3 to raise the tobacco tax being the lone exception). All in all, a very good day yesterday. We’re still waiting to hear the results in Montana and Virginia, and with the possibility of a recount in Virginia, we may be waiting for a while. But for now the Democratic candidates are in the lead, so the things are looking good.

And the best part of all this is we don’t have to watch any more political ads! We all win in that race, no matter which way you voted yesterday. Unfortunately, the end of the midterm election means the start of the next phase of the 2008 Presidential campaign. Sigh.

The mid-term election is finally here! No more political ads! No more phone calls asking for my vote!

I voted first thing this morning as I always do. My polling place has switched from punch cards to both touch screen and optical scanning devices. I used the touch screen system during a recent local election and found it to be cumbersome and quite a bit slower than punch cards. There are also only five machines at my polling place, so people get backed up pretty quickly. I’m sure things will get better as people get more familiar with the systems, but this morning I watched over and over as poll workers had to keep giving tutorials on how to use the machines for every voter. The need to activate the machine for each voter also slowed things down, with three machines sitting open waiting for someone to activate them.

I used the optical scanning system this morning since everyone has been saying that doing so is your ticket to getting in and out quickly. There was definitely a numerical advantage as there were twice as many stations to complete paper ballots as touch screen. Unfortunately people seem to be incapable of filling in the ovals in a timely manner. I saw people five or six ahead of me go up to vote who were still there when I turned in my ballot to be scanned. I can’t imagine what was taking them so long unless they hadn’t bothered to decide how they were voting until they saw the ballot. if someone hasn’t made a decision by election day, they should seriously consider staying home that day.

Now we wait….

Today was my lucky day. I spent the morning at a Microsoft TechNet briefing about Active Directory and Exchange 2007 security. As is the case at most any IT event, there are always drawings for prizes. Most of the time they are for things like shirts or mugs or other promotional items. Once in a while, however, the vendor will actually give away something of real value, like a PDA. That was the case today. At the beginning they announced that at the end of the session, we should turn in our evaluation forms and in return we’d be entered into a drawing for an Xbox 360.

Now, I’ve been to a lot of these kinds of events, and I never win. Let me repeat, I NEVER win. I can’t tell you how many Xbox systems I didn’t win at this year’s TechEd alone. Well, today my luck changed. And I have the Xbox 360 in my living room to prove it.

Every year I carve three pumpkins for Halloween. One for me, one for Kristin, and one for Collen. This year, I decided to commemorate the Cardinals’ World Series victory with a special pumpkin.

‘Nuff said!