Its no secret that I spend a fair amount of my time in World of Warcraft. My main character, a Human Paladin, is on the US-based realm of Stormscale.

In order to support the 12 million players, Blizzard operates a network of 500+ servers (called Realms) across the globe. From time to time, these realms are taken offline for maintenance or upgrades by the Blizzard Tech staff. This post is about how to track these periods of downtime so that players can easily monitor the status of their realm.

1. Start by visiting http://warcraftupdate.net/ – a directory of all the US-based realms.
2. Search for your realm, and click on the title once found.
3. This will link you to your Realm’s Twitter profile (such as the one for my realm, Stormscale).
4. Follow the profile in order to receive updates whenever your realm goes up or down.

For the alliance,
Tim

It’s an exciting day for Myst fans. The iPhone and iPod Touch version of the game was approved today and is available in the App Store.

Welcome back to Myst. Wherever you are

The original Myst sights and sounds have been meticulously re-assembled for a remarkable experience on the iPhone and iPod touch. Everything that you remember from the original Myst in a format where a simple touch or swipe moves you through the world.

That is, if you live in a first-world nation.

It is not currently available in the South African App Store, and thus I cannot bring you a real review at this time. I’ve emailed the Lead Developer and am hoping that he’ll be able to get it into my local App Store.