Jobless Still...But "Work" Continues

The deal with the early stage startup (which recently closed a Series A round from 2 firms) fell through. It left a bad taste in my mouth. They dragged the whole process out over a week only to email me this: "Thanks for taking the time to speak to us. Unfortunately, your background is not a good fit for the current position we have open." It's odd they came to this conclusion after I nailed the technical screenings with their engineers, and they thought I was good enough to talk with the VP of Engineering and the CTO. They even asked for my references, but in the ensuing 5 days, they never called a single one. I also had an inside person there who said everyone was impressed by me and it was pretty much a done deal. However, their Director of ASICs admitted to having difficulty with the compensation package given where I was at. After doing a little research on my own, it looked like I would be offered a 25% cut. So, to save face and not be called cheap, they chose to say my background was not a good fit rather than saying they wasted everyone's time because they can't afford me. What a joke.

Instead of long hours at the early stage startup with a menial salary, I've accepted a consulting gig at a large, public company. I won't have to cut back on my gadget spending and I'll only work 40 hour weeks, leaving plenty of time for my own projects.

On that note, my Google Latitude project is progressing nicely. Still, not yet at the point to post screencaps, etc. Another project I started yesterday was creating an xPL bridge in Python. I had already created a rudimentary way to link xPL networks across the Internet using EventGhost and the Network Sender & Receiver plugins. I'm still using EG at our other house, but I don't really need to use EG on my HA server, so I stripped out the Network Sender & Receiver plugins and made them into standalone Python scripts. I've also gone one step further and made the receiver script capable of re-sending the bridged xPL messages as if they were sent by the original source. Now, I can fully view the remote xPL network and configure the remote apps as if they were local. There's still a lot of tweaking and clean up to do, and I am pondering building a C# xPL bridge just to make things less of a hack. The thing is, I still use EG on the remote network and the thin client it runs on is rather limited, so I don't really want to add another app on that machine.