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.
