The Belly of the Beast

Today I went to a workshop at one of the Amazon headquarter buildings in Seattle. I took the bus, which I think might be a first for me in the Seattle area?

There were lots of black sheep statues. Who knows.

The workshop was hosted by Weaviate which makes a vector database product. Wikipedia has a beautiful description of what that is which will surely make any person react as if they've been hit by a taser:

"A vector database, vector store or vector search engine is a database that stores and retrieves embeddings of data in vector space. Vector databases typically implement approximate nearest neighbor algorithms so users can search for records semantically similar to a given input, unlike traditional databases which primarily look up records by exact match. Use-cases for vector databases include similarity search, semantic search, multi-modal search, recommendations engines, object detection, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)."

The Amazon offices are pretty swanky.

Lunch was provided.

I used Slack at Disney quite extensively. It's funny when you work at such a large and famous company that every screwup becomes front page news.

We spent some more quality time with Nana Baba.

We may have the happiest relationship of all time.

First Seattle Storm Game

This is how I feel about free stuff:

"Because only one thing counts in this life! Get them to sign on the line, which is dotted! You hear me, you f****** f******? A-B-C. A—Always. B—Be. C—Closing. Always. Be. Closing. Always be closing!"

I spotted some sign at the Kirkland library about free WNBA Seattle Storm tickets and I got enough of them that we could bring Lydia's dad and brother with us too.

This was my first WNBA game, so that was exciting. It was also fun because it was toward the end of Sue Bird's final season. "She spent 20 years in the pros and has many accolades to her credit. Bird was a two-time national champion at UConn before becoming a four-time WNBA champion and five-time Olympic gold medalist."

Some differences between other sporting events I've been to: there was a dance team but it was comprised of little girls. There was also a kiss cam type thing but instead of kissed it was like high fives or something. My theory is that there were so many same sex couples at the game that they wouldn't be able to tell who was together, so they just sidestepped the issue entirely.

The half time show was taiko drummers which was very cultural of them. I don't like to brag but I have a bit of taiko instruction under my belt.

Evan and Sam were wowed by the Amazon One technology at the concession stands, where you can just wave your palm to get in, pick up whatever you want, and leave. The magic cameras will know what you took and email you the bill. Big Chicken is Shaq's chicken chain, so that's fun too.

Ben Gibbard, lead singer of Death Cab for Cutie, was in attendance. I have actually recently seen the Bellingham, Washington originated band when they opened for the Foo Fighters.

I think it's cool that since the arena is Amazon sponsored that they advertise tv shows.. not the usual beer or whatever sports arena ads.

Storm Wins!