Music@Menlo

Friend Peter and his wife Georgia are music lovers and support the new Music@Menlo chamber music program in Menlo Park. The festival runs in the summer, but during the off-months they organized a thank-you concert for donors. I got to tag along as a guest. The program featured past, excellent students from the program, and also Wu-Han, pianist. The setting was amazing - in a house tucked on the side of a hill in Los Altos. They had a veritable theater in the home, the result of Mrs. Birnbaum being a singer. She claims she sang with the Cincinnati Opera back when performances were at the zoo. She predates our time in Cincinnati apparently.

Mr. Birnbaum was assistant to Carly Fiorina, president of HP that was recently forced out. I learned after leaving that he recently gave an IEEE presentation on IT and electronic libraries. See "Cybersecurity considerations for digital libraries in an era of pervasive computing," Birnbaum, J., Proceedings of the 2004 Joint ACM/IEEE Conference on Digital Libraries, 2004, 7-11 June 2004 Page(s):169. If I had known I would have struck up a conversation!

Later that day we had lunch with my college roommate Ann Hill, who drove up from Salinas. She is a prosecutor for Monterey County, and that keeps her busy. Her beat is abusers/molesters. Disheartening cases.... We walked and talked to exercise her dog. Thus ended the weekend.