Keith Sklower's Personal Home Page

Welcome! I'm flattered you dropped by to find out a little more about me.....
So, tesselating my life and loves in an arbitrary way, here are some typical classifications:

Work:

I'm a computer programmer at the Berkeley campus of the University of California.
You can follow this link to get the usual tombstone of research projects, etc.

Music:

I'm involved with music in a couple of different ways:
Performing. Making music is a very visceral and restorative thing; it helps me put my life in perspective, renews optimism, refreshes the ability to perceive detail and nuance, and probably does for me what meditation does for a lot of other people. It's my reward in life! You touch somebody's soul when you make music with them . . .

I play oboe in the Prometheus Symphony Orchestra, the The Golden Gate Park Band and the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay Freedom Band

Recording. A performer always wonders what it really sounds like out there; having been bought out of a company I helped to start a long time ago provided the funds to get some fairly decent recording equipment (which is never good enough ... of course); and offering to record groups I play in has led to recording mostly various other amateur groups with occasional professional ones peppered in from time to time (like the Noe Valley Chamber Music Series and in the distant past, San Francisco Chamber Orchestra and Berkeley Opera).

I do location recording with studio quality microphones onto a mac laptop using the metric halo ULN-8, and can even make custom compact disks for people. When CD recorders were expensive and rare, I also did some work for the Kronos quartet transcribing the "tapes" they use for the live-ensemble-and-tape genre of music to custom CD's.

Listening. I like music with a "high hummability quotient" - that can span the gamut from Beethoven to Gershwin to Holly Near. Being forced to play music again and again for 10 weeks can improve one's opinion and appreciation about it ...

Given the amount of time I spend making music, and because there are opportunities to hear live performances of special artists or events crop up just often enough around here, there isn't much time left to sit down to listen to recordings. Since music is something that grabs most of my attention, it doesn't do it justice to put it on in the background.