I have been addicted to the Sierra city building series for as long as I can rememeber. I have spent hours and hours, weeks, days, months, building Roman, Egyptian and Greek cities, so, when Caesar IV was announced last year, I marked it in my calendar, and starting counting down the days.

The release day has come and gone, and I have slowly started playing the ‘new and improved’ Caesar.

The interface is the biggest source of pleasure, and the greatest pain in the arse. The new 3d feel is great, but the game is a little difficult to manoeuvre, especially the whole right-mouse-button-rotate-thing. Sometimes, it rotates a little, sometimes, it rotates far too much, and, sometimes, it does something completely different. The buttons seem to behave the same way, where sometimes, you can click all you want, and diddly happens.

Game play, on the other hand, is great. The game is far harder than its predecessor, and I haven’t been able to find any cheats, which means I have to actually build cities that generate their own money!! (and I am enjoying it too)

The gods are also a little sensitive, and actually want shrines where the citizens can worship, otherwise they destroy your buildings.

Invaders can also be bought off – just make sure the price you pay isn’t more than a rebuild would cost.

I am not entirely sure I would spend as much time on this game as I have on previous editions, but it is slowly growing on me.

Being the happy adventurer than i am on occasion, i was browsing some of the Word 2007 options, and noticed a ‘new blog post’ option. Of course, it mentioned Blog, which meant it had my attention straight away.

I had to ‘register’ my blog settings, which took all of 3 seconds (the longest bit was looking up my secret word again), and off i went. (Word makes use of email posting to MSN)

... or should i say, off i am here to now?

*shakes head*

I have to admit that Office 2007 is slowly growing on me, like a nasty fungus. I am still trying to figure out exactly where all the things are that i normally use, but considering that i mostly use Outlook, and Word for a little bit of report writing, and don’t forget Excel to make lists, there aren’t that many buttons that i have had to play hide and go seek with yet. In fact, using previous versions of Office had much the same effect on me – there are features that i so rarely use, that i always search for them when i do need them. And, there are a couple of the auto-formatting options in 2007 that rather appeal to my need for efficiency.

I still haven’t even opened Visio 2007... i was going to do so right now to see what it looks like, but realised that i did not even install it.*

Ok, back to my topic... blogging from within Word (or even the entire Office suite) negates the need for the Live Writer, and various other tools. Of course, it all depends on what the final product looks like once it is posted – but i think i could get into this.

Built in is support for MSN Spaces and Sharepoint. It also would seem that blogging sites like Livejournal would be supported (an ATOM interface is supplied). Again, this would have to be tested.

So, let’s see what this baby looks like.

* i have a ‘install as you need’ policy, which means i frequently have to install applications when it is already too late. I might, one day, modify said policy.

Due to some testing requirements for potential customers, I broke down and installed Vista RC1 on my laptop. Specs:

Pentium 4M 1.8GHz
1GB memory - 64MB shared video memory
ATI Radeon

overall, the performance of RC1 is far better on my laptop (obviously, again, i switched off all the pretties), and the networking issues i experienced with Beta 2 seems to have been resolved. i managed to work the entire day without a single glitch - and i tend to work my machines hard, so having survived a full days work with me scored some brownie points.

however, in the evenings, i like to watch movies or tv shows before i finally pass out, and here, things have not performed all that well. Media player 11 seems to not be terribly happy this time round, and continually freezes up my machine, regardless of whether i am playing music or another type of media file. and when i say freezes up, i mean i have to use the powerbutton to regain control of my machine. this has been terribly annoying. i would have suspected my graphics driver, which i purposely did not upgrade this time round (mainly because the catalyst has more than doubled in size between XP and Vista, but also because the native driver seems to work fine), had it not been for the fact that it did this during music playback as well. i also attempted another media player (VLC), and the same thing happens, so i am not entirely sure right now what could be the cause.
it makes it rather hard to be happy with Vista though, because i require my laptop to be both for work and play. of course, i am not a big fan of desktop operating systems as it is, and if RC1 is giving me this many hassles with media playback, i am not convinced that i would even try RC2 (which, i believe, is due for release in the next week or so)

EDIT: it could very well be an incompatibility with my ATI card (following a quick net search)