2026.4.9. Appropriate at Seattle Rep

4/9, Thursday. First show of Appropriate at Seattle Rep. 2024 Tony Award winner by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. The main plot is 3 siblings gathered at a southern plantation house after their father died to liquidate the house. One of the kids found some secret photographs and jars, thus caused more chaos to the already strained relationship. Appropiate is serious interspersed with irony and comic. 2.5 hours long. It covers a lot of topics: redemption, racism, pornography, parenting, money. What's approapriate and not. Every adult in the play has some issues. Excellent acting and beautiful stage set. Highly recommend.

2026.4.4. UW Cherry Quad + Tiger

4/4 Saturday. The sunny weather continues. The air is still crisp in the morning.

Went to UW's cherry Quad early today, so didn't encounter the crowd, because I arrived before 8am. I had ~20 minutes before catching bus 271 (once an hour) to Bellevue. The leaves are coming out, and flowers are on the way down. Still lovely. The Quad is half in shade, and the shadow casted by the tree trunks makes everything more photogenic.
Today, you can see Rainier from the Rainier vista. There's a large white letter W for folks to take photo.

Bus 271 is strange. It goes from UW all the way to Issaquah on weekends and evenings, but not during the day on week days. First time I took this bus.
Got off at Bellevue TC for Bellevue City Hall. There's a tech event today here. This is also my first time in Bellevue City Hall. Nice looking building with a water feature. The event is badly organized (no proper signage, no schedules posted, they made you follow them on Linkedin when you check-in, some organizer would cut the speaker short and prompt themselves). Some of the talks are not bad. I liked Krishna Kumar Parthasarathy (Microsoft, in this photo)'s on digital threat and how fast and ominent, and Jake Hammock (City of Seattle)'s on quantum cybersecurity. According to Jake (copied from his slide):

• what will break:
  • RSA-4096: TLS certificate, PKI, S/MIME, code signing
  • ECDH/ECDHE:All TLS 1.3 key exchange, including PFS sessions
  • regular Diffie-Hellman: legacy VPN key exchange
  • ECDSA/EdDSA: SSH public keys, JWT signatures, TLS auth
  • All elliptic curve variants: Bitcoin, FIDO2/WebAuthn hardware keys
• what may survive:
  • AES-256: survives Grover's, retains 128 bit equivalent security
  • SHA-384 more longer hash functions remain secure. SHA-256 is marginal
  • ML-KEM (FIPS 203): lattice-based key encapsulation, replaces ECDHE in TLS
  • ML-DSA (FIPS 204): lattice-based digital signature, replaces RSA/ECDSA
  • SLH-DSL (FIPS 205): hash-based signature. Conservative, slower, code signing

Left early to go to Tiger, continued on bus 271. Soon after I got off the bus, a black teenager tried to talk to me, while looking at his phone, as I walked on. Once I understood that he didn't mean well, I told me to leave me alone, and walked faster. However, he had a scooter and just followed me and tried to engage multiple times. Once I got on the trail, he got off his scooter and followed me. The beginging of the trail was in bushes, and I was alone. Thankfully, soon 2 bikers came out, and then 2 hikers came out. The teenager seemed backed off. I picked up a fallen tree branch for a hiking pole as well as a potential weapon. As I gained elevation, I realized that no one is behind me. The whole thing got me quite upset. I don't know what made him pick me as his victim. How can I avoid it. At least next time, I should take a picture and send the photo out.

Apart from this, all is smooth. Weather is so warm, sunny. Reached Tiger 3 ~6pm. Clear view of the Cascades, Olympic mountains, the sound, Rainier, Bake. Continued onto Tiger 2. Went back on Adventure Trail, and out to Sunset Blvd, instead of how I came in, so to avoid the stalker, just in case. Waited in front of the policy station (where the bus stop is) for 50 minutes!!! Bus 554 in the evning runs only once an hour.

Today, I tried another pair of walking shoes, one that I am considering taking to the Camino. Maybe I was more careful, or maybe its tread is better, I didn't fall.

2026.4.3. Astronaumic Art + Circus

4/3, Friday, UW. 2 events this evenings, both are enjoyable, and worth a few lines.

First, the opening of UW Plantetarium Arts' exhibition of Colectivo Arte Guenda - a group of female artists in Oaxaca (not all Mexicans). 22 artists were given an imprint of an SDSS targeting plate made in UW. They created their visions in the same 38"x38" frame, incorporating the holes on the plate. All very different and many are interesting. Only one embroidery. A couple of collages and photography. Most are paintings. Peace Kat gave some of us a tour of the pieces and talked briefly about each and its creater.

At 6pm, 3 people gave a speech: Yvonne Kennedy (Curator of this exhibition, Guenda), José Franco (UNAM), Peace Kat, and Sarah Tuttle (astrophysics UW). I very much enjoyed Sarah's talk, and learned about these plates. Kat is a good speaker. She emphasizes the systemic under-representation of women, and the goal of Guenda. At the break, before this panel, I got to checkout the actual plate and the robotic fiber positioner. Had to leave early, in the middle of this panel discussion.

Wolfed down some food I brought, and practically ran to Meany Theater for the 8pm show Passengers that I watched 2.5 years ago, by 7 Fingers, a Quebec circus group. Still quite enjoyable.

2026.4.1. Advanced Tech Policy Town Hall

WTIA's Arry Yu hosts many events every year. This one is by far the best, most informative.

• WA State Department of Financial Institutions (DFI)'s Faith Anderson (Acting Director of Securities), Shannon Tushar (Program Manager Division of Banks), JJ Choi (Chief of Regulatory Affairs Division of Consumer Service). They have office hours that anyone can stop by or call for consultation.
• WTIA's Director of Government Affairs, Amy Harris on this past short legislative session in Olympia ($M tax ...).
• WA State Attorney General's AI Task Force lead, Yuki Ishizuka. Their most recent report is this PDF.

~180 people signed up, but less than 50 showed up. So much food. A pity. Kudo to Arry who ordered dinner from a small business in the International District. I also enjoy reading her newsletters, especially the 10 lessons she just learned recently.

2026.3.26-28 Electric SEA

Electric Sea 2026 is hosting a so-called hackerthon at ArtLove Salon, where I took a few art classes recently. I signed up for a workshop taught by Grant Hinkson. He has prepared 6 nicely crafted wooden box, precut plexi-glass plates, PCB board designed by him and manufactured in China (shipment arrived in 4 days!). In class 1, we hooked up the wires with the controllers, and an Teensy 4.0 microcontroller (Amazon or Sparkfun). In class 2, we downloaded his code, and flashed onto the Teensy with Arduino IDE. We verfied that our connections were correct by checking the readout in our laptop using his debugger, for all the controllers: 4 rotary, 2 sliders, 2 buttons. Then we screwed the bottom plate on, jammed the USB cord through the outlet. Too bad that the plug where the USB cord goes through is too tight. I, and Daniel, fried our microcontrollers. Last, open Visual Studio, grab any example from OpenProcessing, modify it by using AI (Claude) with an example he provided.

3/28, Saturday, evening, OK and I arrived almost at 7pm. I asked her to sign up for the award ceremony. But no one checked her registration. We walked around different installations, ate sandwiches and spring rolls. Saw a group using VR glasses, one girl with her colored fabric patches of her year of pain, a group with LED lights that get brighter if one light is near another, a large screen of static kelp and sound of water (diving), a cut piramide-shaped robot, a large paper-mache with lights that turned color when you touch it, a webapp that registers user's hand gesture to ~8 emotions based on predefined questions and then plot the the questions in shiny spheres colored by aggregated emotions... The inventor (or the group of designers) stood by their products and tell you what they are about. To be honest, a lot of crap. But a great chance for people of different discipline to get together and play. Here's Grant's station showcasing what we built: 3 boxes here (total 6 students). None of these are final prototype, but a tool to use in some projects.

At 8:15pm, Elizabeth Churchill gave a talk to encourage everyone playing with AI. She's part of a planning team for an AI univesity in United Emerit. Luckily she's not there now, with the ongoing war. A good speaker. Afterwards, the organizer Third Place Technologies presented awards to the "digital kelp", and the "light together".

Daniel's microcontroller woke up last evening. Safety fuse? Grant gave me back my dead MCU. However, when I tried it later, it was still dead.