John Carrino

I love this town. UIUC is very nostalgic now after just 2 years. I was glad to see most of my core group of ACM friends that I pretty much never see (even though some of them live within an hour of me). Ari’s talk was good. It went well except for the obligatory demo failure. Despite that, Ari did well recovering and the demo for the product that I work on went great as always. I’m gunna hang out with my family here in a few hours and it will be nice to catch up with them as well.

Also interesting news is that I just booked my flight to China for the Beijing Olympics. I’ve always liked the Olympics and the summer events in particular. We are in the lottery for 5 events and Yisong thinks we will get 2 or 3. He has family there, so we will be able to get free lodging, not that we would be hurting for cash while we were there. Also, it will be nice to visit with someone that can speak Chinese because we will be able to get around better and get all the good deals.

OK, so DHL delivered my new Dell laptop to B Wilson on the 9th of August. Dell shipped me a new laptop and DHL fucking delivered that one to S Williams. WTF? DHL sucks so bad. The good news is that S Williams was nice enough to leave my Dell box on my doorstep, so when I came home to try to track down my laptop, I was very pleasantly surprised to find it. So now I have my new laptop and am writing this blog post on it and life is good. Also I hate DHL.

Some more good news, I went climbing recently and have put some more pictures up on my gallery.

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 have been noticing a trend lately with companies I interact with. None of them can do their job right. I will provide 4 recent examples that all happened in the last 2 months. There are many other smaller things, but I am just mentioning the big things.

Just yesterday, DHL delivered my new dell laptop to someone named B Wilson. No one in my apartment complex is named B Wilson, furthermore I suspect it may have been delivered to Redwood City instead of Mountain View. Check out the DHL tracking number here. Fucking B Wilson is probably loving his new 2GB laptop.

Comcast had to come to my house 4 times to get my internet and TV working. FOUR TIMES. And now my internet is starting to flake and I don’t get 2 of the HD channels that I pay for. Also they didn’t cancel my Seattle service, even though I physically showed up at the comcast store to return my cable cards and told them to cancel it. The comcast rep out here said it was “canceled on paper, but not actually canceled”. WTF?

I don’t even want to get into Anytime Relocation, holy shit. See my other posts ranting about them.

United Heath care had some of my medical insurance funds locked up from when they acquired definity health. I had 2 “rapid resolution specialists” help, one said that the funds just didn’t show up and they would automatically be drawn out. Obviously I didn’t get my money as expected; the other specialist told me that my money was frozen and they will work on thawing it for when I filed a claim. I told them i had already claimed it and they need to get me my money and they said that they would work on thawing it and to get back to them.

In summary, companies try to extract money from you by being retarded and hope you just take it. I suggest that you do not.

In other news, my camera is back and completely fixed. It’s like having a new camera. Pictures will come soon.

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.

Man, moving really does suck. I had everything planned out perfectly. Load Friday, drive Saturday, unload Sunday, work on Monday. Well, load Friday didn’t happen, and work Monday is still on, but the rest is a crapshoot. Hopefully they will show up tomorrow as expected, otherwise I will be truely screwed.

In other news I got my site hosted, so no more horrible upload speed from comcast for you in the gallery. Also, since I have taken the last 2 weeks off work, I have went thought the back log of pictures and put everything going back over a year up on line. I also took some time to stitch a bunch of panoramas.