Splendid, thanks mate.  If that was explained in the manuals I must have missed it.

I think the tutorial covered it.

After a couple of days Steam sales break, now I'm tempted by MOH, Divinity 2 and the Mafia DLCs. I want Settlers 7 too but not until the permanent internet connection DRM is removed.

Is MOH worth it at $30?

This is proving to be a pleasant way to spend an hour or so.  I've completely mastered driving diesels and electrics but haven't tried steam yet; I assume it must be quite different and much more complicated.  A few observations:

• How are you supposed to know when a different speed limit comes up?  The first I ever know about it is when the limit shown beneath my speed suddenly changes and I find myself 40km/h over the limit.
  

For speed changes you get a warning on the side of the tracks first, a yellow signal that looks like an arrow pointing down with the speed limit coming up posted on it. Usually there are 2 posted on it, the top number is for passenger trains the bottom is for freight trains. After that, the next yellow speed limit signal that you see will be the start of the speed limit area.

Congrats on being an IRONMAN!

Any word?

The deadline for the quiz is Jan 3rd, then results will be a week or two after that. I will post what happens when I know 

Bah, I left the discs for this game back in the US. Now I'm hoping it'll go on the Steam sale so I can rebuy, though right now it's $15 for both WiC and Soviet expansion.

Contemplating on getting Cities XL 2011. At $20 it's an "I'll think about it", if it was $10 or lower then it would've been an instant buy for me.

Veronica Mars

+1 for Firefly

Wow, thank you all for your assistance, I would have never been able to get all these on my own.

I think I will submit this later on today and hope that it will be enough to get me the prize.

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!

Hopefully there won't be any more temptations like Dragon Age going on sale.

Dragon Age + Expansion just went on sale today.

I'm tempted to pick up the expansion.

I played the BNSF Cement Snoot scenario and at the end of it, an AI train would keep colliding with a parked set of cabs at a siding. Apparently, this is a known issue. Just sucks that I can't finish this scenario after playing it all the way through due to an AI error. 

Before y'all think I'm a trivia genius I will cheerfully confess to only knowing some of these. For the rest I used my l33t search engine skillz

That is some l33t search engine skillz sir.

Holy cow, I think we're almost done. Thanks a lot guys, couldn't have done this without your help.

And for #100 I think there's an error in the quiz, which you should get bonus points for spotting   Malcor III is from the STNG episode "First Contact", which shares its name with an STNG movie...which doesn't take place on Malcor III

that's the same thing I came up with.

I got confused on that one as well.

Nimoy is with an "i"


Pretty sure 61 is Ella Fitzgerald and 62 is Wagner

73 is, of course, It's a Wonderful Life and 75 Metropolis

Thank you, I corrected Nimoy. I had it written down correctly on my paper, must've typo'd it.

Is the answer to 31 "Marmalade people" or "Rocking Horse people?" It's the lyrics to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" that much I know.

Don't forget to make sure you have a rock solid Internet connection if you get AC2, as it uses Ubisots new DRM.

Thanks for that, guess that makes it easier for me not to buy AC2.

Ok, here's what I got so far, both from my own Googling and GT contributions:

1. Charles Dickens (Attech) 2. Jules Verne 3. Leo Tolstoy (Gryndyl) 4. Herman Melville (Gryndyl) 5. Ernst Hemmingway (Bullwinkle) 6. Che Guevara (Bullwinkle) 7. 8. The Simpsons (Bullwinkle) 9. Academy Awards Best Picture 10. Leonardo Da Vinci (CeeKay) 11. Vincent Van Gogh (Bullwinkle) 12. Jackson Pollock (Bullwinkle) 13. Salvador Dali 14. Andy Warhol (Bullwinkle) 15. Ice Hockey (Bullwinkle) 16. Golf 17. Cricket 18. Soccer (Gryndyl) 19. Tennis 20. Sublimation (Einsteinium) 21. Wojtyla (Last names of Popes) (CeeKay) 22. Copenhagen 23. Othello (Bullwinkle) 24. James Bond movie titles (Gellar) 25. Raul Castro (Gryndyl)

26. Bhumibol Adulyadej (Einsteinium) 27. Namadi Sambo (Gryndyl) 28. Bronislaw Komorowski (Gryndyl) 29. Dilma Rouseff (Gryndyl) 30. Tupi 31. Rocking Horse people 32. Titan 33. John Wayne 34. Lactic Acid (Einsteinium) 35. 36. Jordan 37. USA 38. UK 39. France (Gryndyl) 40. Russia 41. Cuba (Gryndyl) 42. Hillary Clinton (Einsteinium) 43. Leonard Nimoy 44. Bono (Einsteinium) 45. Pele (Stimpy) 46. Amitabh Bachchan (Gryndyl) 47. Martina Navratilova (Gryndyl) 48. 3 (Gryndyl) 49. Earth (Einsteinium) 50. David Beckham

51. 52. Gloop (Willy Wonka's golden ticket winners) 53. Singapore (Gryndyl) 54. Mikhail Gorbachev (Einsteinium) 55. EmphaSeis (Gryndyl) 56. Kiev? (Envy24) 57. Glenn McGrath (Slackerjoe) 58. Most expensive painting ever sold 59. Basmati (Einsteinium) 60. Yehudi Menuhin (Gryndyl) 61. Ella Fitzgerald (Bullwinkle) 62. Wagner (Bullwinkle) 63. Bjork 64. Placido Domingo (Stimpy) 65. Madagascar 66. Benin 67. Myanmar 68. Argentina 69. Sweden 70. The House of Flying Daggers 71. 2001: A Space Odyssey 72. Amelie (Gryndyl) 73. It's a Wonderful Life (Slackerjoe & Bullwinkle) 74. Slumdog Millionaire 75. Metropolis (Slackerjoe & Bullwinkle)

76. Albert - Processor, Brenda - Marine, Clare - Land (Purge) 77. Niels Bohr (Einsteinium) 78. Max Planck (Einsteinium) 79. Albert Einstein (Einsteinium) 80. Enrico Fermi (Einsteinium) 81. Erwin Schrodinger (Gryndyl) 82. 45 (Purge) 83. Lady Gaga 84. Angela Merkel (Slackerjoe) 85. Rosalynn Carter (Stimpy) 86. Queen Rania Al Abdullah (Gryndyl) 87. Michelle Wie 88. 30 (Einsteinium) 89. Fleetwood Mac (El-Producto) 90. Optowave (Einsteinium) 91. 92. Michael Collins (Gryndyl) 93. Opel 94. Alfa Romeo 95. Peugeot 96. Skoda 97. Bentley 98. Wikipedia 99. 100. Star Trek First Contact?

you want us to help you cheat and win a kindle.............

It's not cheating since they said to ask friends and family, well, I'm just asking my GT friends and family

Wait, you've gotten over half of them? It would be nice to know which questions that would be, so we can help you with the rest

I'll post what I have so far once I get to work. I left my answer key there yesterday.

Gah! Assassins Creed 2 for $12 (I own AC1 on Steam), Railworks for $6 and Recettear.

So tempted but really shouldn't.

My haul so far:
Bethesda Pack
The Witcher

Total damage to wallet: $75

I'm hoping they won't have anymore sales that I would be tempted to buy.

*Sigh* Just bought Puzzle Quest and Greed, total: $4

So now total damage is up to $79.

I could use some assistance from the GT hive mind with my company's holiday quiz. There are 100 questions to the quiz and it's in PDF form, so I've shared it on my dropbox folder (too big to attach here, 2mb file). So far, I think I've gotten over half of them.

The quiz is here: *removed, if you still want it you can PM me*

Thank you in advance for any assistance.

Oh, the prize is a Kindle 3, in case you're wondering.

I'd love to test one of those Google laptops for them but not being in the US, that kind of disqualifies me right off the bat 

Picked up Battlefield: Bad Company 2 for $6.25. It's been a long time since I played a battlefield game, but I felt I needed a shooter that wasn't CoD style.

I've seen this for sale twice now but I've passed it up both times because I'm just afraid it's old enough to where no one is playing it online much. That's basically all that game is. I'd hate to buy it to find out it's dead.

It's not dead, especially now with the Vietnam DLC.

I am so tempted with the Bethesda pack. I had most of those games but left them in the US when I moved.

Decisions decisions

Does the developer have any plans to release this on Steam or Impulse?

Just curious why you guys bother backing up.  You can redownload whatever game and even the larger ones only take maybe 2 hours at the most to download.  I am pretty sure I have the self-restraint to wait two hours.  And while I am playing whatever game I am interested in, I can then begin downloading the next one.  I guess if I had 200 games, it might be an issue, but I am never playing 200 games at the same time.  Maybe three at most, I guess.  I dunno, it just seems like a huge pain to back this up to discs when I could just redownload.

I recently purchased Alpha Protocol.  It took me 16 hours to download.  Not everyone has super fast internet.

Edit to add:  Steam refuses to download in the background while playing a Steam game.  As soon as I launch a game from Steam, Steam pauses all downloads.

I live across the pond so ditto on the super fast internet. Took me a day to download the latest BFBC2 patch and that's only 2.5GB. Backing up comes in handy even for games I don't intend to play anymore, I just back it up then uninstall it. If I want to play it again, I'll just restore and download patches instead of the whole game.

Steam pauses the download when you start a new game but you can alt-tab out and restart the download as soon as the game starts. I do that all the time, except for online heavy games.

As far as backing up Steam, can we back up everything to an external hard drive, or would I have to use discs? God knows if I use DVDs it'll take forever.

You can use their archive feature or just copy the steamapps folder to an external HD. I've done it both ways before and they worked fine.

I helped my boss with his laptop HD that was dieing. I used Ubuntu LiveCD to boot the machine and mounted the drive then copied all the data over. The copy process took forever, with many error prompts, but it did manage to get the data out eventually.

I've been with steam since they first started and have never had any issues with them. Now that I've moved half way around the world, digital download is about the only way I can be sure to get legit copies of games and Steam is definitely my first choice.

I thought "Singing in the rain / Umbrella" mash-up was really good. "Forget You" was good as well.

That was awesome.

I wonder if Andrew Zimmern would eat that if it's fried.

Yeah, I'm fine and I believe Victoria Raverna is fine as well as we're both pretty far away from the earthquake and tsunami areas.

It's been one heck of a week for us here in Indonesia with the earthquake, tsunami and now volcano. The volcano is closer but still pretty far away so we're not affected. We did get affected by Tuesday's massive rainfall that created floods all around the capital city. That literally ground the city to a halt, took people anywhere from 3-7 hours to get anywhere and traffic didn't let up til about 23:30. If you think traffic in your area is bad, think again: http://www.thejakartaglobe.com/home/it-was-the-worst-traffic-i-have-ever-seen-in-jakarta/403307

This is the one I use at home: http://www.amazon.com/BenQ-V2220H-Ultra-Backlight-Monitor/dp/B003UES8Z2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1285995690&sr=8-1

It's got HDMI, DVI and VGA inputs, LED backlight. No complaints from me so far.

Thanks for the heads up Ceekay, didn't hear about this til today. I think I'll give it a shot.

If you think you may want to have Remote Desktop access then I think you need Professional.  I went with Home Premium and have since had several occasions where I wish I could use Remote Desktop. 

You can get around that issue by using one of several free programs like GoToMyPC or TeamViewer.

self propelled guns

after some consideration I think I need to try on of those out.

SPGs are fun, but usually you're one of the main targets for everyone and if you don't have a good team that's willing to defend, usually out pretty early in the game.

Well wont be paying anything for this after all. i've loved the game and planned the whole time to buy gold but they gave me a 3 day chat ban for bitching about cheaters and thats that. I guess they'd rather let cheaters keep cheating.

You can still play and not pay them anything at all on release. I think that would stick it up to them better than you not playing at all.

I am currently living back with my parents and has been ever since I returned to Indonesia. It's fairly normal here to do that, even married couples do that until they either can afford a house or inherit the parent's house.

It took quite a bit of getting used to after 14 years of living on my own but I'm fairly used to it now, plus I have crazy schedule so I'm hardly ever home, and easier to have dogs since there's always someone home to play with them.