disruption.ca

I’ve been doing a bit of programing with the goal of learning some basic Javascript. The result is the TinyURL Explorer. You can read more on the about page.

Jay asked me to tell him my “dig a hole” story, and after writing it up, I decided that it could serve as blog filler. So here we go:

The year I was backpacking I spent some time living in Sydney, where I picked up casual work as a laborer on a construction site. About the third morning I’m working there, the boss comes up to me and tells me that I need to dig a hole, and he marks as spot on the ground with some spray paint. I find out how deep he wants it, and I ask him what I should do with all the dirt I dig up. He points to a bare spot nearby, and tells me to pile it there. I say, “Ok, no problem” and I spend a couple of hours digging a hole.

A little later that afternoon my boss comes up to me again and tells me to stop what I’m working on and come with him. We walk back over to my hole, which hasn’t changed since I dug it earlier, and stop. He says “I need you to get rid of that pile of dirt” and points to my pile. I mentally sigh, but say “Sure, no problem, where should I put this dirt?” He stops, thinks for a second, looks around us a little, and says “fill that hole.” Completely dead pan, and without any indication that he realized what he was asking.

It wasn’t even a make-work project to keep me busy. I was doing useful work until that point. Nothing had been done with the hole either. It was a completely wasted effort. I suppose it did have the benefit of amusing the eastern European contractors on the site who would mutter things about the “stupid don’t know anything boss” as they walked past me. I didn’t really mind doing the work though. I was getting paid by the hour for my efforts, which is better than I can say for some tech dirt moving that I have done for contracts in the past.

IGN has a trailer of the upcoming Doom movie. It’s pretty much what you would expect, but one thing caught my attention. The final sound effect is a very familiar roaring scream. The same sound effect occurs in Starcraft when you click on the terran academy.

Intrigued, I checked google for more information. I didn’t find much. Apparently this same sound is used in the game Dark Forces when a storm trooper gets knocked off a ledge. I have also read that this is the same sound that tie fighters make in the original Star Wars, and that an orc makes the sound when falling off a cliff in one of the Lord Of the Rings movies.

The frequency that this clip occurs makes me think it is some sort of Wilhelm scream, but it doesn’t match the Wilhelm samples I’ve heard online. Does anyone know anything about the story behind this sound?

If anyone wants to read more about this, I have found a couple of uninformative, but interesting discussions.
The first is in a discussion of the doom trailer. Search in page for scream. This page isn’t really safe for work.
The second is this thread in a slashdot story about the Wilhem scream. Again, not much real info.

Update: The story of the screen has been found, read the new post.

I decided a while back that I wanted some web space to dump things that I find interesting. After much procrastination I have registered a domain name, set up wordpress and entered some content. I don’t think my site will be very blog like, but it seems to be the format all the cool kids are using these days, so I went with it. It at least beats editing html by hand. I probably won’t be posting very often, but if you want to know when I do, grab the rss feed.

Please look around the site, and if you have an opinion on any of it, let me know.

One final note: I’m sorry if the site is slow. The server is tiny, so please don’t get me slashdotted.