Initially, I thought there was the only long wait. When I started the game, it performed an update with the server. It took another awfully long time to process “large file”. After that, I had to restart the game to start playing. Over the course of the few days, it had to be updated a few times. Perhaps, it is because it is still a fairly new game. There is much to be updated.
The first ten to twenty minutes was spent going through a sort of “tutorial” on the basics of the game. Although “basics”, it was sufficient to get me get started. Along the way, there was pop up guides to provide hints and “to-do” to proceed with the game.

At the start of the game, I had to build roads, basic infrastructures (ie, water supply, electric power, etc), zoning the areas, etc. The fun part was to slowly, from nothing, seeing a town being form, from hourly deficit to profitable, the expanding towards becoming a city.

Later, I was guided to put public services (ie police station, schools, etc) to increase the land value, so as to attract wealthier residents.

At a certain point of the time, I was prompted that, I need more residents to provide workers for the factories. I kept expanding the residential zone and yet there was very few occupants in the new areas. It took me a 2nd hour into the game, before I was “guided” that, to increase the density of the residential area, I need to upgrade the road. I think it was one of the fun parts of the game, to discover new tricks.

Before I knew it, I was prompted to start another city in a neighboring area.

I found that Simcity is an interesting game. It is opened ended, and I believe I will spend hours playing this game. And I am still learning how to play this game.

What I like about this game is that, it is a software. I just need to install on a computer and I can play it anytime without having to look for friends to play the board game version. I can choose the number of computer players in the game.

Like the board game version, the character occupation is random. Of course, we can click on “back” and “next” repeatedly to “select” the occupation we want.

An interesting part of the game is any time I need some help, there is a help function. I can click on it and get additional information, may it be the investment, or market situation. This provides us with more information to build up our financial knowledge.

The game also has attention gasping animated rat and tortoise. These two characters occasionally would comment on our decisions.

Overall, I quite enjoy this game, playing to build my financial knowledge while having fun. This is one game which I strongly recommend.

Recently, I need to draw block diagrams for some presentations and reports. I began to explore using the free vector-based diagramming program OpenOffice.org Draw to create such diagrams.

I have used other expensive vector-based diagramming program before. Comparing to these programs, OpenOffice.org Draw produces professional looking diagrams to be pasted in the documents or presentations without the money cost involved.

In general, I find that OpenOffice.org Draw is quite easy to use. It took me some time to get myself familiar to the new interface. This software calls its functions differently. For example, instead of “order”, it is called “arrange” for deciding which item to be in front or at the back.

Other the naming difference, there are very few difference as compared to other vector-based diagramming software.

OpenOffice.org Draw, being part of the suite, provides easy export to Adobe PDF files. This allows us to easily put these files in the public domain without the worry that other would modify it.

There are also some areas which I think the OpenOffice.org Draw can improve on.

One area is the lack of “single click to rotate 90 degree” function. OpenOffice.org Draw does provide the free hand rotate function. But sometime, we do need to rotate the object at 90 degree for alignment. It would be some issue for people like me who has poor sense of alignment.

Overall, OpenOffice.org Draw is a very useful and easy to use vector-based diagramming program without the money cost. It has helped me to produce professional looking diagrams.

OpenOffice.org suite is available for free downloading at http://www.openoffice.org/