What I Do

Analytical Chemistry

I work for Agilent Technologies , helping to design instruments for chemical analyses. That means that I do things like this:

• Write software
• Do math
• Drill holes in metal
• Play with lots of other fun things

Much of my work has focused on time-of-flight mass spectrometry. Here’s a fun demo illustrating the principals of TOFMS.

See my Curriculum Vita. (PDF)

Conducting

I’m the Music Director of South Bay Philharmonic, which was once known as the Hewlett-Packard Symphony Orchestra. I'm also Associate Conductor of Nova Vista Sympony.

• See my conducting repertoire
  and conducting résumé
• Recent quotes:
  "George was an excellent conductor, with a good sense of the scores and a practical approach to handling the time we had during rehearsal. I especially enjoyed his sense of humor on the podium. He made our rehearsals truly entertaining."
  "He was so well prepared with the music, his conducting was always very clear,  he knew exactly what he wanted to do musically, and he brought incredible energy to the podium."
• I’ve conducted the orchestra at Google in Mountain View (now known as the Googler Orchestra) several times.
• Read a silly little article posted about me at work in 2000.
• I was one of four conductors in Redwood Symphony’s performance of Ives’s 4th symphony in 1998. See a photo.

Oboe / English Horn

I’ve played oboe and English horn in various local groups. Here’s a fairly complete list:

• Googler Orchestra
• Nova Vista Symphony
• Peninsula Symphony
• Master Sinfonia
• Redwood Symphony
• Palo Alto Philharmonic
• Palo Alto Chamber Orchestra

Here are some video and audio clips:

• Playing Star Wars in a Star Trek costume
  
• Playing oboe and (pre-recorded) piano
  Diana Keech’s Scherzo Rondoso (excerpt). I’m playing oboe and pre-recorded digital piano here, at a Fall 1999 HP Symphony concert, in what is believed to be the world-premier recording of this piece.

Find more audio and video clips here.

Web Design

I manage or previously managed the following web sites (not including this one):

• South Bay Philharmonic
• Redwood Symphony
• Gianera Villas Home Owners Association (no longer active)

Typography

I design and typeset the concert programs for Nova Vista Symphony, Cambrian Symphony and South Bay Philharmonic. For many years I helped produce marketing materials for Redwood Symphony as well.

Once upon a time, I was the typographer for Inforum, an internal publication of Agilent Laboratories.

Here is an old piece I wrote on Typography for Scientific and Business Documents.