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From SPCoast

About Katy Katy's LinkedIn page Download Katy's Resume as PDF Katy Dickinson was the Director, Business Process Architecture, for Sun Microsystems’ Chief Technologist’s Office (CTO). She creates then communicates measurably effective long-lasting corporate infrastructure, tools, systems, and processes. Her specialty is acting as an efficient change agent who resolves persistent and complex organizational problems. Katy worked for Sun 1984-2010 in Engineering, Marketing, Quality, Operations, Legal, Corporate Standards, Corporate Strategy, and Sun Labs. She worked as a Six Sigma Master Black Belt for the CTO and Sun Labs 2002-2010. In August 2009, Sun Labs published Katy's Sun Mentoring: 1996-2009 Katy's Blog is at katysblog.wordpress.com

About John John's LinkedIn Page Download John's Resume as PDF John Plocher is a senior software architect and engineer with a passion for UNIX systems-level architecture, open source development, process design and model train electronics. While at Sun for almost 20 years, John worked directly for senior executives on key corporate programs, led architectural governance efforts, mentored development teams on a global basis, evangelized developers and stakeholders to build cross-company strategy efforts, managed development teams and created tools to support knowledge sharing and product development risk assessment. John has been elected twice to the OpenSolaris Governing Board; he is also on the boards of SMUM, a local neighborhood food, education and resource center and SVL, a high tech model railroad club.

SP Coast Model Railroad Layout

John has been modeling the modern day Southern Pacific/Union Pacific, ACE and Caltrain operations in the SF Bay area for several years now; he has plans for a modest sized empire that captures both the flavor and the diversity embodied by each of them. In this reality, the SP/UP merger is still recent enough that the equipment and operating details haven’t yet become dominated by the suits in Omaha, and we will somehow find the time to do all the work waiting to be done…

Electronics Projects

Some people like scenery. Others are born modelers. John's interests lie in the technical side of things - electronics, operations, dispatching and the like. He has designed boards to control turnouts and detect rolling stock using Digitrax's LocoNet; other projects to build control panels, handle power districts and deal with signaling are still on the drawing board. The common theme for these efforts is JMRI - the Java Model Railroad Interface. JMRI is a set of programs that interface to your model train layout and let you manage and run it via control panels, automated scripts, and over the internet

Software Projects

A collection of various software projects John is working on: Arduino_Loconet, C/MRI and JMRI.

Restoring WP668 - an exterior braced wooden caboose

January, 2006 was a busy month - we went on a business trip to St Petersburg, Russia (brrr) and bought a caboose. OK, the caboose was in San Francisco, at the GGRM, but we were half a world away and under time pressure. The whole story can be found at wp668.org as well as on KatysBlog and Trains of Thought.

Photo Archives

Finally, our family photo archives are here and on Flickr. In addition to the mundain family stuff, there is also a large set of "work in progress" pictures recording the saga of WP668, my electronics projects, railroading, gardening and church activities. Private stuff is password protected, so don't feel that you are snooping :-)