John Carrino

I will be in Seattle on the weekend of September 14 and 15. We will be having dinner and showing a demo and having drinks. The demo is really interesting and you should come check it out.

Here are the details.

If you have already gotten an invite from me, you can just send me an RSVP and I will forward it to Lily. If you have not gotten an invite from me yet and you want to go, just email me that you want to go and you’ll be there. Even if you are just wondering what I’ve been working on and want to check it out, you should try to make it.

I am headed back Today, Friday Aug 03, for “BIRTHSTRAVAGANZA 2007″. Haven’t heard of it? It is the birthday party of Lusk being 24 and Dennis being 25 a day later. They have a keg and a couch and I figure it’s a good excuse to see what’s been up for the last month. Crazy Andy should be moved into his condo by now and I’ll have to check that out.

If you miss me on this trip, I’ll be back in Seattle again on Friday, September 14th for a Palantir event. We will be showing our friends in Seattle what we have been up to lately. It is a really rocking demo and should be a fun night also. If you want an invite, just shoot me a mail.

So normally, i use a big gallery update as a reason to put something here, but my camera is in the shop. After 25000 pictures my shutter release button became unusable. UPS said that Nikon signed for it on Wednesday the 25th, so I am waiting to hear what the damage is. I figure it will run about $250. Sightly better than buying a brand new D80 ($900) or a D200 ($1500). I’ll stick with my 6 Megapixels for a while. I recently got a free poster print offer from shutterfly.com for a 16×20 and it came out just fine with my current resolution. I could have probably used 10MP of resolution for a print that large, but whatever.

I have shot JPG for a while and been great with it, but I am thinking of giving RAW a try. I never did give it a real chance, because there aren’t that many RAW workflow tools for Linux. I have recently broke down and bought a windows laptop from Dell, so I will test some raw programs out and see what they can offer and get back to you on that.

Life in California is good. I saw Transformers yesterday and it rocked as I had heard. I will pick it up in HD-DVD as soon as it comes out. One nice thing about not working at amazon, is that when I go to amazon.com at work, I am actually logged into my buying amazon account instead of my testing account.

I have added a new feature to my gallery where you can view the rated photos in any sub-album. By default the Rating module will only show you the top rated items across the gallery. I thought this was dumb, so I added the sub-album feature and a “View Rated Items” link on each album page. For example here are all the rated items (3 or higher) from the most recent 4th of July.

As it turned out, the movers did show up on Saturday, but it was 12:30 before they got there, which puts them just over 27 hours late). It seems that if you are Anytime Relocation, you can show up anytime you like. I had already reserved a rental truck at Penske (which was a great customer experience) as a back up plan. It turns out that the movers that showed up were mad style shady and didn’t have paperwork that is federally required, so eventually I sent them home. They were still promising that I would get my stuff on Sunday (it was 2pm on Saturday before they got sent home and when I drove down with only 6 hours of sleep I made it into town at 8pm). The driver was talking about seeing his kids and being on the road for 6 months and “driving strait through me” on the way home and that I would surely get my stuff on Sunday. After I told them to go home due to shadyness, the driver was talking about hitting up downtown Seattle and going partying. I am pretty sure his original plan was the same, only partying with my stuff.

So I picked up the truck and called a crew of my friends who showed up in no time. I got the truck back at around 3 or so and I was on the road by 6 with all my junk. For the record Katherine, Nick, Ben, Buffalo, Keith and Dennis get promoted to BFF.

I have a few pictures of the trip out. After we got into town, things started settling down and we had 4th of July and then Yisong visited town and we did some hiking.

So, the movers were supposed to show up today at 7am. They still aren’t here and I am super pissed off (it’s about 9am now. Also you know I am super pissed off, because I don’t have anything better to do but rant about it and none of my freinds are up yet. But they will read this later). But funny story, I call the driver like a dozen times and about 7:50 he answers and I say “Hello, this is John Carrino”, to which he responds “Oh, shit!” as I am sure he was rolling out of bed with a monster hangover. He said he would be here in 45 min, but I won’t hold my breath. I am trying to figure the best course of action at this point. It might involve dropping a roll of $100 bills on the counter of a rent-a-truck place.

A lot has happened since I last posted, probably because I hate blogging, but I figure if you got here, you should be kept up to date. I have put in my official end date of June 15th at Amazon and will be moving to sunny California to work at Palantir starting July 2nd. Lots to do with moving and finding a place to live and all that stuff.

Also, I got some Lasik last Friday. I have 20/20, but there are crazy halos around anything that is bright. Hopefully it clears up with healing, because it sucks. Pictures of my bruised eye to follow.

Yisong is back in Seattle which should be awesome. He is my number 1 guy.

I have finally dug through some of my pictures and have put up the whistler trip in February.

I will look into actually getting hosting for my site because it has been hella slow and I will be moving soon.

Also, I am late to the party, but icanhascheezburger rocks.

I recently picked up a sweet, sweet TV and it is the p-hat, phat bzomb. It is the newest generation of DLP and looks amazing. I also picked up an xbox360 to go with it and now I love HD content. Unless the content is really awesome (House, Heroes, Scrubs, South Park), I desire to only watch HD. I also picked up an HD-DVD attachment for the 360 so I can see my movies and TV shows on HD-DVD in the full 1920×1080 resolution that my TV displays natively.

Amazon is running a pretty cool deal and HD-DVD and Blu-ray players. If you buy a player, then you get 10% off all High Def Disks for the next year. Which combined with my 10% employee discount and 3% back on my amazon credit card and amazon Prime, comes out to a pretty sweet deal. 23% off DVD’s and free 2 day shipping, Hell yeah!

At this point I pretty much have to get digital cable for sports and other good stuff of the sort. Maybe I’ll have the SuperBowl in HD. I love HD!

You probably know who I am if you are reading this. If you don’t know me, stop stalking me.

I went to school in Illinois from the ages of 4.75 to 22.5. I got a BS and MS in Computer Science at the University of Illinois. I then went to Amazon.com in June of 2005 and have been working there since.