goings on

I've been working on an idea to build a system to benefit regular train passengers. I wrote up a nice little proposal for the train authority and then tried to get in touch with them. I got names of 2 people at the train authority, thanks to blog readers, and I spoke to one of them today.

Getting through the secretary was tough, but it definitely could have been tougher. She wanted to know who I was and who I was calling from and with regards to what. So I made up a company name and told her I was calling about the proposal. She wanted to know what proposal, so I told her it was for the new system proposal that we were working on. She then wanted to know what the system did. So I said it in a "why don't you know this already tone." Finally she let me talk to her boss who listened to what I had to say and told me that he didn't want to see my proposal and he didn't want to meet with me. His reasoning was because they are in the middle of a tender and this is one of the services in it and he can't look at proposals from other sources in the middle. At least my Hebrew is working at a high enough level to have these conversations.

Now the question is, lets say I can circumvent the train authority and build my system without them. It would be more difficult and less accurate but it would still work. Are they actually bidding out the project that I am working on and when will it come to the market? It could be one of those things that will never actaully happen, in which case I may as well go ahead with it.

In other news, I just released the newest version of the EyeTravel system for home care ophthalmologists. My next order of business is to rewrite it from .Net with a SQL Server background and a c# client to python with a postgresql background and an as yet undetermined client, though I've been thinking of wxWidgets. I have someone in mind to market it as an open source solution, give it away for free and charge only a monthly service fee and special development costs.

I have a couple other potential projects to work on, so we'll see what the next month turns up.