It occurs to me that since I went to the trouble of making the access control feature for this site, I may as well use it. So here's a little more of the scoop on what the nanonation job would involve, should they decide to offer me the position.

I went into the interview having no real idea what they might want me to work on. Though they don't like to use the word "kiosk", Nanonation sells "customer touch-points" and digital signs to retailers or other organizations that want to put out interfaces for the public to use.

Before the interview, Yanthor told me that their client kiosks run on MacOS X, and speculated that they might want me to work on the servers that are used to "push" content to the clients. Since we knew the job somehow involved Linux, it seemed like a reasonable guess.

Well, now that I've interviewed, I have a much better idea what the project involves. Sorry Yanthor, but you were wrong. It's much more ambitious than that.

They're currently in the preliminary stages of investigating what it would take to create client kiosks that run on Linux. (Also, they currently have models that run both on MacOX and Windows.) For a while, they had an intern that was working on porting their current client code to Linux, but he left, so the project was temporarily shelved. If I am hired, that project will be revived.

It would be a challenge. Their stuff is written in C++. While I didn't explicitly say that I haven't done much of anything with C++ for years, it was probably fairly evident from the lack of it in any of my recent jobs, but I did make sure to mention what I did with the, ahem, Warscape project all those years ago (but not by name).

There would also be a lot of web services and xml parsing, since that's what their architecture is built around. Also, the intern who had started it was working on using mozilla for embedded rendering.

The other potentially tricky part is getting embedded media to (which their apps use in large quantities) to play. (And yes, I mentioned mplayer, but they correctly pointed out that there might be some nasty issues of legality with regard to licencing there.)

So basicly, if this goes ahead, my short term project will be to spend a couple months getting a "proof of concept" demo working. Depending on how that goes, it could turn into a regular full time employment position.

The more I think about it, the more I'm thinking, "Wow, this would be a cool project." Linux development on the client side. Sweet!

Then I wonder, "Wow, am I really going to be up to this?" In terms of technical challenge, I think it is at least a notch anything I've done since the beginning of my professional career. It might involve flexing some mental muscles that haven't been used in quite a while.

Meanwhile, as I wonder whether I'll get a chance to try, I'm contemplating what to do about that gas station job. When I asked the manager there when he needed to know my decision, he said, "ASAP." Someone quit last week without giving two weeks notice, so if I had wanted to, I could have started today. He said he had a couple of other applications, but mine looked the best. (Meaning: If I couldn't give him an answer pretty soon, he would have the option of calling other people who had also applied.) So I told him I'd let him know tomorrow.

[cutting it short. Off to the scifi gathering.]