2024.12.7. Piggy-pudding Caroling + Stimson Green + ANT Gallery

12/7, Saturday, noon. This year, the Piggy Pudding Caroling is happening during the day, while all prior caroling have been on Friday evening.
I got to Pike Place Market late (~1:20pm), all the teams have dissipated. But the highlight is the award, where the finalists perform one more time. The "best carole" is awarded to Puget Sound Company, the competing 2nd is Beacon Hill High School. (See above photos) The "most creative" this year is awarded to Silver Bell, the competing 2nd is Beaconnettes. Beaconnettes concluded this event with their 2024 version of 12 Days of Christmas. I love Beaconnettes, not just for their ridiculous hair, but also the lyrics that showcase every year's main events.

Tessa Floreano hosts a lauch party of her new book at Stimson Green house. I walked by this building many times, this is the first time being inside. In fact, the only reason that I went to this book talk is the location. I had never heard of Floreano, nor interested in a thriller. Most in audience are her friends.
She talked about the genesis of the book, read a short piece. She is very nice, brought quite a lot of food, and gave everyone a gift bag.

Later, on my way to Exhibition Hall, saw a lot of people at ANT Gallery. There, I found this young musician playing Bandura, in accompany with a new exhibition titled Under Fire - Sacred Art in Today's Ukraine, a collection of recent art work from Ukrainier art school faculty and students. Liliya Kovalenko, president of Ukrainian Association of Washington State also gave a short speech.

There's an openning reception of a different artist, who brought a wine with "removed alcohol". It is surprisingly good. I found these interesting: 2 made of sea shells, a few very colorful digital work by Abishek Maid, and always Tom Saknit.

2024.12.6. Ebru Yildiz at Cornish + Twinkle Twinkle at Freeway Park

12/6. Friday. Went to an Art Lecture of visiting artist Ebru Yildiz at Raisbeck Auditorium. I really enjoyed it, and this New York-via-Turkey based photographer. She discussed her works, and thoughts and preps behind some of them. She does portraits (sometimes more than 1 person, often a music band). Very candid, modest and approachable. She emphasizes practice, do at least one thing everyday when you are not working on a project. Also research before you work on a project.

Twinkle Twinkle at Freeway Park. Dickens Carolers sang in 2 sessions. Between them, one lady from Mini Breaks Dance taught a few dance moves, and crowd participated.

At the same time, roast marshmallow with chocolate over fire, or make holiday cards with stamps, ribbons, sparkles. Last year, I burned my marshmallow so fast, that I didn't try this time. I did make a few cards, and enjoyed it.

2024.12.5 Google AI roadtrip

12/5 Thursday 1pm. Google hosted this AI in Action training lab at Westin Hotel, not sure why not in one of its many buildings.

I arrived a few minutes before 1:30pm, just before the lab supposed to start. Surprised to see so few attendees (6? 7?), and out of them, I knew 2. They are organizers of GDG Seattle. Seems the goal today is introducing AlloyDB AI and Vertex AI Agent Builder to create an AI agent for a shopping chatbot. Reference: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/generative-ai

First lab is using simple SQL in Google's AlloyDB to set up tables and embedding. However, for these training accounts, it times out so quickly, that we could only load 8 rows of data. 2nd lab is building the AI agent using the model setup in lab #1. If you are not familiar with Google Cloud, it's hard to find where things are. There were 3 Google employees (other than the 2 teaching the labs) onsite to troubleshooting our errors (usually caused by missing steps of the labs or things changed since the labs were tested). We ended with a quiz and a survey. Everyone got a pair of very colorful socks. (why socks?)

At the end, they laid out 2 stations of food in the next room, and a drink station. I was astonished to see this much food for so few people, especially, there were almost nothing during the first two "refreshment" timeslots.

One cool thing is that 2 artists were hired to draw cartoons of us. I received 2 very colorful drawings. They are very fast.