I enjoy games like Civilization and SimCity. However they have a downside, they take too much time. I invetably get sucked in and play for hours at a time. While that may not be a problem when you have hours to waist, it doesn’t happen all that often for me. Enter Ikariam.

Two key features for Ikariam are the pace of gameplay and interacting with other players.

First the game forces you to take a break by causing things to happen over a long period of time. For example, if you build a building, it may take 4-8 hours to complete. During which it doesn’t do any good to sit around babysit. This means you can log on once or twice a day for 5-10 minutes and not worry about falling behind.

Start playing at: ikariam.com (Choose world Epsilon if you want to be on the same server as me.)

We all chickened out figuring that the poor behavior of our individual dogs might be a catastrophe when combined, sort of like an Anti-Power Ranger.

Maybe next year.

Today I successfully navigated the Dallas public transit system thanks to Google Maps.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been taking the train to work two to three days a week. Today however I got an urgent request to pick up a presentation at a location that wasn’t close to a train stop. Just as I was preparing to take the train back to my car so I could drive past work to the pickup location, I stumbled on Google Maps Mass Transit Planner. It works just like driving directions except that it provides bus and train stops instead.

I was able to follow the directions and quickly make it to my destination and back. An hour long ordeal turned into a 20-minute experiment in mass transit. So here’s to Google Maps and DART for making my day easier.