Costa Rica Trip Day 5 - 2009-03-10

Photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/link774/sets/72157615091387056/

Today was fairly interesting because the first kiosk for OutFront Media finally arrived. Kellian works at OutFront Media, which may end up being where I work as well. They (among other things) are attempting to have a network of these LED kiosks with advertising on them. Robb had Kellian and I come over to the warehouse where it was being stored so we could check it out.

The cab driver had a hell of a time finding the warehouse, we ended up driving around in circles for quite a while before finally finding it. When we walked into the warehouse we were surprised by how large the kiosk was (see pictures). It is quite impressive! Unfortunately, it got a bit beaten up in shipping so a specialized electrician was working to clean and repair the display modules.

We spent most of the day waiting in the warehouse for the electrician to finish, so we could see what it looked like when it was powered up. Robb had me looking over the technical manuals for the software that runs the kiosk to figure out what we needed to do to get it running. The operation seemed fairly straightforward, so I set up a demo program that we could load once the hardware was operational. Unfortunately, the electrician didn't finish before the warehouse folks kicked us out, so we'll have to give it a try tomorrow.

After that we headed out for dinner with Robb and his family to a place called Inka which had Peruvian food that was pretty tasty. The service was somewhat poorly timed though with the entrees coming out over a period of about 10 minutes.

After dinner we went to Robb's house, since his house is a bit closer to the airport and Kellian and I needed to pick up Liz at 10:00PM. Liz is coming to visit and scope out Costa Rica as a potential place to work for a while.

We got Liz, just as planned, and took a cab back to Kellian's apartment. The first cab didn't have a meter and tried to charge us too much, so Kellian told him to stop and we got another cab with a meter. It ended up saving us about 25% of the fare!

When we got back to Kellian's place, we introduced Liz to the roommates who were up and about and had a bite to eat. Tomorrow, we're going to check out the kiosk again and then take a plane to see a volcano.