Tricks, Hacks, and Workarounds

I am writing from the same old computer again - this thing is like a cat with nine lives. A month or so ago I conducted transplant surgery and replaced the faulty power supply with a new one, and this time the remedy took the form of an amputation. While attempting a completely different repair, I mistakenly disconnected our secondary hard drive. As soon as it was unplugged, I realized that the problem was solved - apparently whatever was wrong with the hard drive was preventing the computer from completing its regular starup routine.

The downside is that all of our photos since Disneyland were on the broken drive (maybe they can be recovered?). The upside is that we saved some money and I got to feel like I 'fixed' something; in fact, the effort I've put into it has probably increased my affection for it. Even though it is almost three years old - which is about 67 years in computer-years - it is still able to play Battle Field 2 on gaming nights with Jim and Trevor. I feel like Han Solo when he said of the Millenium Falcon, "She may not look like much, but she's got it where it counts".

Anyways, now that our computer has been recommissioned, I wanted to use this first voyage as an opportunity to share a post that practically wrote itself during my drive home from work - sometimes you just "feel it". So without further ado (and 'ado' in this case means 'medical or nautical allusions') I would like to share with you a few of the inside tips that have improved my life.

The Konami Code

While playing Contra on the original Nintendo Entertainment System, I learned about this secret "cheat code" that Konami had built into the game which gave a player a whole bunch of extra lives. When the title screen first came up you had to press the following sequence of buttons on the controller: up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, "b", "a", "start" Here is what the Internet has to say about The Code:

The Konami Code was created by Kazuhisa Hashimoto, who was developing the home port of the 1985 arcade game Gradius, a scrolling shooter released on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1986. Finding the game too difficult to play through during testing, he created a cheat code which gives the player a full set of power-ups, which are normally attained gradually throughout the game.

The Konami code was introduced to many gamers in the 1988 NES version of Contra. Due to the game's intense difficulty, many Contra players became reliant on the cheat code, which increased the player's lives from 3 to 30 (9 to 90 including continues), to finish the game. The game's popularity, combined with the near-necessity of using the code, made it renowned to an entire generation of video game players. This led to the code being used in countless games, and even mentioned across popular culture. For example, references to the Konami code have appeared on web sites, in comics, TV shows, T-shirts, license plates, music, and even professional wrestling.

Hidden content - or "easter eggs" - are fairly common in video games these days, kind of like those "outtakes" at the end of modern animated films - really cool the first time it was done... but now kind of contrived. Similarly, back then this was the first "cheat code" and it was exciting. It made you feel like you were in possession of some secret knowledge. And as everyone knows,
Knowledge is power and Secret knowledge is awesome.

Thanks to The Code, I eventually beat Contra.


The Tac and the Telephone

The guys and I learned in junior high that if you touched one end of a small piece of metal to the inside of a payphone receiver, and the other end to the metal cradle that the receiver hung from, the resulting connection somehow simulated a quarter being dropped into the slot, thereby allowing you to make local calls for free. Here again was that feeling of excitement - secret knowledge that gave us power over a machine and differentiated us from the quarter-paying masses. Bear in mind that this was also the era of MacGyver, so I walked around with a tac stuck in the sole of my shoe, always prepared to improvise should any sort of payphone emergency arise.

I realize that this trick is dishonest and I wouldn't normally share it, but I'm pretty sure that Telus has long since fixed whatever problem it was that made their phones vulnerable to kids who didn't want to pay for all of the prank calls they made during their lunch hours and recesses. Plus, everyone and their dog has a cell phone these days - drug dealers are probably the only ones that still use payphones.


The Short-Circuited Chicken

I've never actually tried this, but a mission companion once told me that if you hold a chicken's beak to the ground and draw a straight line out from it in the dust, the chicken will continue to stare at that line without moving. It was explained to me that somehow by looking at that vertical line, or by crossing its eyes, the chicken gets all, uh, jacked up or something. Here is a better description from the Internet:

A chicken can be hypnotized, or put into a trance, by holding its head down against the ground, and continuously drawing a line along the ground with a stick or a finger, starting at its beak and extending straight outward in front of the chicken. If the chicken is hypnotized in this manner, it will remain immobile for somewhere between 15 seconds and 30 minutes, continuing to stare at the line.

This may not be clinical hypnosis, but instead a case of tonic immobility. Instead of a hypnotic state, the chicken's reactions are more akin to a turtle moving into its shell, or a deer freezing from a spotlight--a defensive mechanism intended to feign death, albeit poorly.

This technique is useful for farmers who need to slaughter a chicken and do not have help immediately available. It is also useful in feeding large pet reptiles who are too slow to catch a moving chicken.

The first known written reference for this method came in 1646, in Mirabile Experimentum de Imaginatione Gallinae by Athanasius Kircher. H B Gibson, in his book Hypnosis - its Nature and Therapeutic Uses, states that the record period for a chicken remaining in hypnosis is 3 hours 47 minutes.

At first glance, this may not seem as "useful" a trick as say, extra lives or free phone calls, but upon closer inspection I think it is even more awesome. This isn't some man-made device with a built in flaw or exploit.
This is like... a glitch... in nature. (I just got chills)


A Contemporary Example

The inspiration for this post actually came from a workaround that my partner at work recently shared with me. Because this post is already pretty long, and because I want a chance to verify it first, I will wait until next time to share it. But I will tell you this much: it involves a McDonald's Cheeseburger and, as far as I can tell, The Internet doesn't know about it yet (although while doing research, I came across "ghetto big mac" on YouTube... it's kind of interesting). If this trick works it might even be better than my other ones - because it doesn't involve any dishonesty or cruelty to animals.


Unless of course you believe that an actual animal is involved in the making of a McDonald's Cheeseburger.



- C

http://konamicodesites.com/