http://shanemhale.com/blog » Geek

Red Pill or Blue Pill?

Shane Hale — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 23:47:27 +0000

Pretty sure this rabbit hole leads to a viagra or porn site.

PacMan

Shane Hale — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 21:48:30 +0000

I haven’t posted anything awesome in a while… so… here’s something.

It’s First Down, I Can’t Believe It!

Shane Hale — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 16:56:06 +0000

Seeing this GIF really brought me back to the days of my Nintendo and Sega Genesis. Seemed like every sports video game had at least one play that was unstoppable. They play if executed properly would always result in a touch down, home run or goal. I vividly remember Joe Montana’s Sports Talk Football, and utilizing the Fake Punt or Fake Field Goal on first down, resulting in a long Touch down. The voice over announcer would proclaim “It’s First Down and I Can’t Believe it… It’s a Fake…” I could spend the entire game executing the same two plays and dominating friends or the computer.

The NHL ’94 side-ways S move that always left the puck in the back of the net. I recall being disappointed with games that didn’t result in at least 20 goals. NHL 93 had a similar play where you could take the puck down the side and pass back to the center for a one touch into the goal.

Perhaps it was just me, but finding these perfect plays were just a part of the video game experience. I don’t think they ruined the game, but just taught game developers to do some serious beta testing and not rely on simple game logic. Now a days these glitches are near impossible to find. In fact I gave up 10 years ago… but the ones that I discovered still have a special memories.

It was always our goal as video gamers to discover these cheese moves first and perfect them before anyone else. It appears as though this guy has done just that.

LOST Finale

Shane Hale — Mon, 24 May 2010 18:34:23 +0000

Where was the Bad Robot!

Last night’s Lost finale was quite the marathon. 2 Hours of Cast / Writer Interviews with clips reviewing all the main characters, followed by the two and a half hour final episode. The entire night was pretty awesome. The final episode was well put together and through the focus on the characters once and more importantly their connections. The review served as a great reminder of the characters and their development over the six seasons, so when the final episode was aired, each characters story came to life, like the flashing of their memories. The entire even was such a feel good experience, with most of the castaways meeting in the afterlife together. I’m a geek at heart, but I’m not the angry geek thats going to be upset about Lost not following the rules or leaving questions unanswered.

During the episode with Mother and Jacob, hearing ‘All answers just Lead to more questions’ I was going into the final episode I believe that many of the questions and mysteries of the Island and the characters would never be answered, but still hoped for some closure on some of the big ones.

Unanswered Questions:

What was the Man in Black’s name?
What was with the ‘special powers’ some characters such as Hurley had?
Why didn’t Ben go into the church at the end? Where was Walt, Michael, Anna Lucia, Mr. Echo, etc?
What was the Cave of Light?
Time Travel… still… really?
What was with the numbers and why did they find Hurley?
What was with the Dharma Polar Bear and Dolphin Enclosures
Where can I download Drive Shaft’s single ‘You All Everybody’, cause its been stuck in my head.

The worst part of the night had to be the very end, when the local news cut in before the ‘Bad Robot’ closing sequence to tell us about a weak aftershock that happened during the show. Lame….

The FourSquare Experiment

Shane Hale — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 21:40:49 +0000

Can I trade badges for girl scout cookies?

Four Square is a relatively new local social media application. I’ve been on FourSquare for a few months now and really haven’t found the purpose besides pissing off my girlfriend from constantly updating my location from my iPhone. So I haven’t really been a full fledged user of the social media application.

To be fair I will say I was an active user of BrightKite until I got bored with that as well. I will say I like Bright Kite’s ability to upload images from your locations. But the applications are pretty close to the same for me. They update my twitter account and allows internet stalkers to keep tabs on me. I think the problem is none of my friends utilize these local social media services. Even the internet gurus out there haven’t really embraced local social media.

So I’m going to (or should say have been) trying to check in to every place I’ve visited during the month of February. This far I’ve received 1 new friend, a new mayorship and a badge. But I’m going to embrace the application. It will be checked more frequently then my facebook page. At the end of the month, I’ll take inventory of what I’ve accomplished and whether it was worth it or not.

Blogger’s Out, WordPress is in.

Shane Hale — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 20:37:14 +0000

Welcome to Shane Hale on WordPress

Over the years I’ve expressed my support for Blogger as a blogging platform, however Google and specifically the Blogger team have decided to stop supporting FTP. Well for me this just sucked. I had several blogs set up for me and other companies that relied on Blogger’s FTP publishing. I’ve used other blogging platforms, but blogger’s link with Google, and the simple fact it was all set up set me in my ways and routinely promoted it to my friends and family.

So the decision came down to who do I go with for a replacement. I knew right away I was going to lose a ton of SEO, unless I could match the file name & location of each post, archive, category etc, but I also knew blogger did a piss poor job of handling my meta data, without unique page titles and meta description. I also need a method to export and import all my previous posts. Recently playing with WordPress as a content management system and blogging platform with MacHTPCGuide.com I decided to leave Blogger behind, and upgrade my blog to WordPress.

As a blogging platform, it’s stand alone and fully lives on my server. I don’t have to worry about it deciding not to publish anymore. (or I hope not). It also has a ton of plug-ins for SEO friendliness. Blogger allowed me to export all my blogs to a file, and I found a webapp to convert them all to a WP File. Built a custom theme that match my old blog, imported the posts and was 95% there. All the Blogger labels ended up as Tags, which is good, but I they all were categorized as ‘Uncategorized’. Which I guess is ok… but I had to sit down and fix all that

So… after investing about 2-3 hours, the blog is all moved over. Hopefully it gets picked up by the search engines quickly, and I’m back to posting about internet marketing, chargers, padres, geeky stuff, design, and random shit.

New Addictions: Bejeweled Blitz

Shane Hale — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 09:33:00 +0000

About a year ago I found myself playing Bejeweled 2, a Tetris or Columns type flash game where you connect 3 or more gems in a row. It was fun and challenging and a perfect way to waste away time or clear your mind before bed.

Last Friday, I discovered Bejeweled Blitz, on Facebook, a 60 second version of Bejeweled. If Bejeweled is cocaine, then Blitz is PopCap‘s highly potent crack version of the game. 60 seconds seems so innocent and the task so simple. Before you know it you receive a badge for 20 games, and 30 mins has passed. The subtle warning of focusing on something distant other then the computer screen is quickly dismissed as you dive back in to the chaos.

25k points, 50k points, 100k points, like a slot machine, Blitz keeps you coming back for more. Just 1 more game you’ll say…and then it happens. You wake up from you all night Bejeweled Blitz-athon, and don’t see you high score, as they reset it weekly.

Not only am I an addict, but I’m a pusher too, as Brandie now is competing for that high score every night.

Ode to Three Wolf T-Shirt

Shane Hale — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 18:38:00 +0000

Today’s wisdom comes from an Amazon Review:

This item has wolves on it which makes it intrinsically sweet and worth 5 stars by itself, but once I tried it on, that’s when the magic happened. After checking to ensure that the shirt would properly cover my girth, I walked from my trailer to Wal-mart with the shirt on and was immediately approached by women. The women knew from the wolves on my shirt that I, like a wolf, am a mysterious loner who knows how to ‘howl at the moon’ from time to time (if you catch my drift!). The women that approached me wanted to know if I would be their boyfriend and/or give them money for something they called mehth. I told them no, because they didn’t have enough teeth, and frankly a man with a wolf-shirt shouldn’t settle for the first thing that comes to him.

I arrived at Wal-mart, mounted my courtesy-scooter (walking is such a drag!) sitting side saddle so that my wolves would show. While I was browsing tube socks, I could hear aroused asthmatic breathing behind me. I turned around to see a slightly sweaty dream in sweatpants and flip-flops standing there. She told me she liked the wolves on my shirt, I told her I wanted to howl at her moon. She offered me a swig from her mountain dew, and I drove my scooter, with her shuffling along side out the door and into the rest of our lives. Thank you wolf shirt.

Pros: Fits my girthy frame, has wolves on it, attracts women
Cons: Only 3 wolves (could probably use a few more on the ‘guns’), cannot see wolves when sitting with arms crossed, wolves would have been better if they glowed in the dark.

Fail Whale Strikes Again!

Shane Hale — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 17:35:00 +0000

Monday Morning… Feeling surprisingly awake and alive and…FAIL WHALE. Damn you Twitter. How about taking some of that VC cash and upgrade you servers.

Speaking of Twitter, if your not already following me or if you are, here are some of the Twitter users to follow:

Twitter.com/ShaneHale7

Twitter.com/brdaga7

Twitter.com/CooperCapone

Twitter.com/OnlineGuruInc

Twitter.com/DMVORG

Twitter.com/PureSalonSpa

Twitter.com/EntertainMac

Twitter.com/onebeeraday

Rambling COHO's – AIM Spam

Shane Hale — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 00:54:00 +0000

Since I can remember I’ve received instant messenger spam on my AIM account. I ignore most of the random phrases they send. It wasn’t until today I noticed a trend. They are all user names with ‘coho’ within them. The funny part is… I don’t mind the spam. They show up at random and often give me a little chuckle.

Here’s a sampling:

trendycoho:

arborealcoho: Pirate vs. Knight. Who wins?

cyclingcoho: I IMed you first. If I deny this later, I’m lying.

dictatorialcoho: Lady Gaga is ugly.

fumblingcoho: I dare you to do something completely expected. Because rebellion against the expected is so commonplace that it’s become the norm, and is thus expected. Are we so desperate for individualism that we need to rebel against every status quo in existence?

mydearcoho: Catholics are fine eatin’.

punishedcoho: You know, some guys just can’t hold their arsenic.

Ok… that one’s creepy.

Update:
I did some googling and found out this is a common thing and has been going on for quite some time. Its not actually spam, but a AIM bot trying to get to AIM users to communicate with each other. The user names of the two AIM users are replaced by Salmon or Coho (a type of salmon) and they would effectively never know who they were talking to.

More information can be found here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheGreatHatsby