Category Archives: News & Reviews

When I came to Bangalore in 2003, my visit was so short I saw very
little outside of my hotel and Sun’s offices. I also did not allow time
for the IEC (India Engineering Center) staff to ask as many questions
as they clearly wanted to.

Having been born and raised in San Francisco (a much-visited
city) and believing firmly that the Bay Area in particular and
California in general are both fascinating and beautiful, I always get
a little irritated when someone visits (for the first time or over and over) but does not see anything. To fly thousands of miles to one of the
loveliest places on Earth (think of standing on Pacific Heights
and looking down at the Golden Gate Bridge and sailboats around Alcatraz
in San Francisco Bay, or looking up at El Capitan in the Yosemite Valley,
or walking through the wave foam on the Mendocino Coast) and then to spend
all of your time in a conference room or heads down at a keyboard seems
foolish, if sometimes necessary.

To avoid further foolishness of my own, this visit to India is longer.
With the kind and wise advice of Venkatesh (a SEED alumnus), my husband John
and I hired a car and driver and went on a road trip. Driving through the
cities, towns, villages, and countryside of southern Karnataka was as fascinating as any of the official sights. We have so far been to Sravanabelagola to see the 50′ tall
stone thousand-year-old Gomateshvara statue (a Jain pilgrimage center),
to the Hoysala temples at Belur and Halebid (although started in the
year 1116, the Channekeshava Temple
at Belur is still in daily use), to Tipu Sultan’s summer palace (the
Daria Daulat Bagh on an island in the Cauvery River), and to the
Maharaja’s palace in the city of Mysore. We have also eaten much
excellent food and done some shopping.

This Sunday morning, we are off to services at St. Mark’s Cathedral,
the oldest Anglican Church in Bangalore. We are taking lots of pictures
and, now that we understand that the High Speed Internet Access wifi
service offered by the hotel only works in theory (that is, it works
well if you use the Ethernet cable and port on the desk), it should be
easier to write more and share some images too.

Josh Simons sent me a link to his interesting blog entry and photos on

Bangalore Traffic from last summer. Listening to the
beep-beep of the auto rickshaws in the street below, John said
they sound and look like budgies – little bright parakeet birds
flitting about and cheeping constantly.

My husband John and I drove north to San Francisco yesterday to go to
Teatro Zinzanni for Valentine’s Day.
(Yes, I know we were celebrating early but the show is sold out for today.) Teatro
Zinzanni is at Pier 29 on the Embarcadero, under
Coit Tower. Traffic was
surprisingly light so got there early. Although I am a native born San Franciscan, I
had never been inside Coit Tower. The murals around the inside were well worth
seeing but watching the sun set from the top of the tower was even better.

Teatro Zinzanni has locations in Seattle (where they started in 1998) and
San Francisco. They describe themselves as “…a bewitching evening of European
cabaret, cirque, divas and madmen, spectacle and sensuality with live music and a gourmet
five-course dinner—set in the nightclub of your dreams!” It is hard to say
who is a madman in San Francisco but the rest is true enough.

The dinner was very good and the courses were served long enough apart that we could
enjoy both the food and the show. The performances reminded me of an upscale version of
the circus, music, and dance shows offered by
CounterPULSE. Teatro Zinzanni has
the same energy and fun but with food, more expensive costumes, and less edgy or
explicit humor.

Teatro Zinzanni’s serving staff and performers were all in costume and character
all 4 hours of the show. Someone would play a minor role in one skit only to be the
star of the next. My two favorite acts were Andrew & Erika (who performed graceful
and impressively athletic aerial acrobatics and dance) and
Mat Plendl. Mat Plendl had
a regular Teatro Zinzanni character named “Mr. Chou Chou” who was the silly and fussy
Master of Ceremonies for the whole show. At the very end, he stripped off Mr. Chou
Chou’s costume to dance with hula hoops. Mat Plendl calls himself “The World’s
Greatest Hula Hoop Artist.” He had about ten hoops whirling around his arms, legs,
body and neck at one time. The different color lights on the metal hoops made
delightful effects.

Members of the audience were brought into the show from time to time but those
of us at the tables against the wall were thankfully spared the humiliation.
The U-shaped back tables were a trick to slide into in a long dress but we had
a good view. There wasn’t much quiet time to talk so it was only slightly
awkward spending 4 hours eating dinner with two very young couples we just met.
I felt very old when singer
Francine Reed sauntered by our table and said that the
gentleman of the couple on our left looked like
Bobby Sherman. I was the
only one at the table who knew who 1970’s teen idol Bobby Sherman was. (There was
indeed a strong resemblance.)

With the cost of the tickets ($123/each) and ticket fees, and parking ($12 – exact
change required for the ticket machine in the lot behind the theater tent), and
drinks, the evening cost over $300. It is not too much for a very special night out.

Several special interest groups of the
PCR (Pacific Coast Region) of the NMRA
(National Model Railroad Association) toured our local train club here
in San Jose, California last night.
The Silicon Valley Lines (SVL)
club is of particular intrest because of the high degree of its computerization.
SVL operates trains using digital command control
(DCC), which
allows engineers to control locomotives independently on the same track.

Many SVL members are professionally in high tech hardware or software development.
My husband John Plocher and several SVL members have been involved in the
JMRI open source software project.
JMRI was awarded
Duke’s Choice award by James Gosling at the 2006 JavaOne conference. Duke’s
Choice goes to the most innovative projects of the year using the Java platform. John
is also working on an open source
hardware project for model train layout controls. We even have a webcam
set up on our home layout so that other members of the JMRI team can test
software changes when we are not there. John is SVL President again this year
and usually acts as Dispatcher for operations nights.

John and I arrived at SVL at 7:30 p.m. and stayed until the club shut down about
11 p.m. Visitors had fun running trains on SVL’s HO-scale layout and asking lots of
questions. SVL is open to the public at 7:30 p.m. Fridays and has its
regular operations night the last Friday of the month. Club members often stay very late. The local Denny’s knows to expect them for breakfast well after midnight.

John and I go on layout tours at least once a year. Visiting a private
home to see what one person can do and then visiting a club layout to see
what a group has accomplished are both interesting. We hope to participate
in the
PCR convention 2-6 May 2007 which will feature dozens of layout tours in
the Santa Cruz area. We also hope to connect with rail fans and model
railfans on our trip to India in a few weeks. We are reading the
IRFCA (Indian Railways Fan Club) web
site with interest.

I finished one book on the drive home and had to go to Border’s
for a new book to get me through dinner. I thus interrupted
my current naval reading theme with the quick read of a famous and
excellent travel book: The Great Railway Bazaar: by train through
Asia by Paul Theroux (ISBN-10: 0618658947, originally published in 1975).

My husband and I have a work trip to Bangalore later this month so
the description of train travel in India was particularly of interest;
however, Theroux’s chapters about travelling in Viet Nam in 1973 just
before America withdrew were fascinating and sadly in line with
current events.
Since John and I have a long drive between work and home, I read him
funny or specially well written sections of The Great Railway Bazaar.
John’s favorite passage was:

The romance assocated with the sleeping car derives from its extreme
privacy, combining the best features of a cupbord with forward movement.
Whatever drama is being enacted in this moving bedroom is heightened by
the landscape passing the window: a swell of hills, the surprise of
mountains, the loud metal bridge, or the melancholy sight of people
standing under yellow lamps. And the notion of travel as a continuous
vision, a grand tour’s succession of memorable images across a curved
earth — with none of the distorting emptiness of air or sea — is
possible only on a train.

Theroux funded his trip with a series of lectures and seems to have
carried a small and superb library along with him. The Great Railway Bazaar is full of quotes and literary references. For example,
Theroux includes a long passage then writes: “There is more, and it is
all good, but I think I have quoted enough to show that the best description
of Calcutta is Todger’s corner of London in Chapter IX of Martin
Chuzzlewit.”

Theroux has strong opinions about people, places, and national character.
Here he is writing from Hue, Viet Nam about the local railway stationmaster:

He was certain that Turkey was just over the hill, and the only difficulty
he envisaged — indeed, it seemed characteristic of the South Vietnamese
grasp of political geography — was getting Loc Ninh out of the hands of
the Viet Cong and laying tracks through the swamps of Cambodia. His
transcontinental railway vision, taking in eight vast countries, had a
single snag: evicting the enemy from this small local border town. For the
Vietnamese citizen the rest of the world is simple and peaceful; he has
the egoism of a sick man, who believes he is the only unlucky sufferer
in a healthy world.

The author is no less critical of his own nation, America. In the chapter
“The Saigon-Bien Hoa Passenger Train” in Viet Nam he writes of some houses
with no drains that he could see from the tracks:

They were appropriate in a country where great roads led nowhere, where
planes flew to no purpose, and the government was just another self-serving
tyranny. The conventional view was that Americans had been imperialists;
but this is an inaccurate jibe. The American mission was purely
sententious and military; nowhere was there evidence of the usual
municipal preoccupations of a colonizing power — road-mending, drainage,
or permanent buildings…. Planning and maintenance characterize even
the briefest and most brutish empire; apart from the institution of a
legal system there aren’t many more imperial virtues. But Americans weren’t
pledged to maintain.