We’ve got a great line up for our next event, held once again at the King Cat Theatre on December 1st at 7pm. Here is the list of speakers for Ignite Seattle 8 (in no particular order). We look forward to seeing you there.

The Speakers

Arianna O’Dell (arianna) How to Sneak into Bars
I am a 19 year old student at the University of Washington. Most people don’t know this because they never ask. I’ve been attending networking events all summer and most people think I’m out of school and already graduated.

Benjamin Franklin – Intellect: without an outlet in the world
Do we remain in awe of Ben Franklin’s capacity and accomplishments or do we take on his mantle of “Doing the best with what we have” and look at our issues and do something about them? Better yet, WWBFD?

Wendy Chisholm (wendyabc) Challenge your assumptions. Innovate. Change the world.
Most designers are taught to design for the average user and as a society we hold many assumptions about the characteristics of those users. However, products are used in unexpected ways and by unexpected audiences.

Sarah Schacht (sarahschacht) Overcoming Cacophony: Making Gov 2.0 Work for You
What can you do, as an individual to make your voice heard in the lawmaking process and what tools do you use? Learn how to make your email float to the top of a pile of thousands, how to stand out from the crowd, and how to do so without losing your sanity.

Eugene Lin – iPhoning my way to retirement, $.70 at a time
I want to be rich. Steve Jobs promised it. App after app, the Apple gods got angry with me. Until finally, with nothing but an accelerometer, two dozen naked women, and the nation of Japan, I had a story to tell.

Greg Dunlap (heyrocker) How to not suck at pinball
Pinball is hard. Luckily, getting better at pinball, not great but respectable, is actually pretty easy.

Scott Berkun (berkun) Everything you need to know about philosophy in 5 minutes
I’m the sad owner of a philosophy degree. I’m convinced i can give people a better education in philosophy (and make them realize how much they already know and love philosophy) in 5 minutes than I got in 4 years.

Jason Carmel (defenestrate99) Defamation and Twitter – A Practical Guide to Covering Your Ass
I will provide a few practical ways that might protect your right as an American to roast the bejeezus out of the asshats of the world, without getting sued into oblivion.

Jeremy Bingham (captain_tenille) An Astronomical Viewing Shelter on the Cheap
Using your telescope in the city can be frustrating with all the stray light all over the place. You can’t do much about the skyglow, but you can shield yourself from stray light sources nearby.

Jon Bell (jonbell) Usability Beyond the Classroom
It wasn’t until I spent a year at frog design as a developer that I realized everything I learned in art school was either wrong, outdated, or only told half the story.

Norman Guadagno (thinktone) Amazon Archaeology OR Swimming In Our Own Clickstream
Every time we buy from Amazon, we give their algorithms a little more information about ourselves (or at least the things we buy). But, do we have our own algorithms to help us make sense of purchase after purchase across time? What can we learn about ourselves through the things we buy?

Peter Wilson (peterwil) Google vs. Microsoft: An Insiders Guide
Google vs. Microsoft: where will the battles be fought, how will each companies strategies and blind-spots impact the outcomes, and who will win? The speaker spent 9 years at Microsoft and 4 at Google, and so thinks he knows something about this…

Ron Burk (ronburk) Three Strange Definitions of Computer Programming Legendary computer scientist Edsger Dijkstra once said: “Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” But if programming is not about the computers, what IS it about?

Veronica Sopher (Shih_Wei) Jewelry: It’s What Geeks Know!
Elizabeth Taylor and Ivanka Trump may have their own jewelry lines, but it’s geeks like you/us who are the experts in jewelry. Yes, it takes a real geek to know jewelry, cut through the salesperson’s bs, and shop like a pro. Let me show you why.

Dylan Wilbanks (dylanw) Everyone Core Dumps: Death and Loss For The Geek
We are all going to die. But handling loss is something geeks struggle with. Learn three things you should do when a friend dies, three things you shouldn’t do, and ways you can preserve your existence online.

And for an Ignite first, similar topic, back-to-back presentations:

Richard Bailey – More blink in less time? Manufacturing electronics for art projects.
The Groovik Cube required a custom surface mount circuit board for each of the 56 facets. Early estimates showed that this would require well over 150 hours of time to accomplish. The Groovik electronics team created an assembly line and produced 90 boards in one day.

Mike Tyka – Cubes in the Sky
We went through about 10 designs each trying to achieve the same goal of somehow raising the 15×15x15ft Groovik’s Cube, weighing near 4000 lbs 10 feet in the air within a fairly tight budget.

Green transportation is all the rage these days, especially hybrid and electric vehicles. Popular wisdom may lead some, including civic leaders and politicians to believe that the greenest vehicle is a hybrid. NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg has been fighting to “Green” the Yellow Cab fleet in that city by forcing all new cabs to be hybrids. The iconic New York City taxi cab often sets the pace for the rest of the country’s cabs.

Would hybrids in NYC really make green cabs? And would the rest of the country’s cab industries follow suit? The answer may surprise you.

About Gregory Heller

Gregory Heller is a partner at Civic Actions, an internet strategy and web development consultancy dedicated to empowering social change organizations.

You can find Gregory on his blog and on Twitter @gregoryheller. Gregory also writes about food on his @hungryseattle Twitter feed. You can find the slides to his presentation here.

Ever wondered what to do with a half-alive beached whale on a remote island in the Pacific? Veterinarian Mandy Sorenson recounts her experience of dealing with this very problem while visiting the Pacific island of Rarotonga in 2006.

After a remarkable and significant attempt to keep a beached juvenile beak nosed whale alive, Mandy was left with the very dirty duty of performing a full scale necropsy (autopsy) while learning how to most effectively use a machete and a rock as her primary surgical tool.

NOTE: Some of the images in this video are fairly gruesome. If you’re squeamish, you might consider not watching.

If you didn’t watch the video, I’ll give you the moral: plastic bags have no place in the ocean.

About Mandy Sorenson

When she’s not performing whale autopsies, you can find Mandy Sorenson in her day job as a “surfing veterinarian” here in Seattle. Follow her on Twitter at mandercrosby.

At past Ignites, we’ve learned that being married to a geek or startup jock can be rough and finding that geek girl can be tough but rarely, do we hear the geek’s side of the story.

Todd Sawicki takes us on a trip into his married life and shares what he has learned being married to a former professional ballerina. Most of us couldn’t tell the difference between a first and fifth position and a Plié vs. a Passé.

In this passionate talk, we learn that even a geek can learn to appreciate and love classical dance.

About Todd Sawicki

Todd Sawicki is a veteran of numerous tech startups, but lately, you can find him around Cheezburger HQ (purveyors of I Can Has Cheezburger and Fail Blog) as Chief Revenue Officer. When he’s not saying “OH HAI” to advertisers, you can find him on Twitter, on his blog or talking shop at Hops and Chops.

Scott Berkun, an Ignite Seattle regular and fantastic public speaker has a new book coming out out on public speaking, “Confessions of a Public Speaker.” The book will be on bookshelves on November 6th, 2009 but in the mean time, here’s a PDF preview and a trailer he put together for it.

Full disclosure: I gifted a couple of images that appear in the book and O’Reilly, one of sponsors, is the publisher.

That said, I can’t imagine a more appropriate book to pimp for anyone considering speaking at a future event

Everyone knows goldfish and koi, but very few have ever thought about where they come from – how they are bred, raised, transported, etc. Lee LeFever knows these things like the back of his hand.

Since 1965, the LeFever family in North Carolina has owned and operated one of the largest fish hatcheries in the US. Blue Ridge Fish Hatchery raises and sells tens of millions of goldfish and Koi a year.

About Lee LeFever

When Lee isn’t telling fish stories, he and his wife, Sachi run Common Craft, makers of the “In Plain English” series of videos. You can find Lee at his blog, on Twitter @leelefever or helping you plan to survive a zombie attack.

When Dan Shapiro was a kid, radio control flight meant spending thousands of dollars to put what was essentially a slightly aerodynamicized lawnmower in the air. You spent thousands on engines and electronics and balsa, months building your plane, crashed it your first flight out, and then repeated.

Over and over, and over again.

Enter lithium polymer batteries, rare earth magnets, miniaturized solid state inverters, 2.4 GHz spread spectrum frequency hopping transmitters and receivers. Then stir it up in a huge domestic Chinese market for RC gear that has pushed remote control aircraft off a Moore’s law cliff of price and performance.

Watch Dan explain how you can get off the ground for a single Benjamin.

About Dan Shapiro

When Dan isn’t geeking out about RC planes, you can find him at his day job as CEO of Ontela, on his personal Web site, danshapiro.com, or on Twitter @danshapiro.

Just a little reminder that Ignite Seattle talk proposals are due on Monday, October 19th. Our next Ignite Seattle will be December 1st at the King Cat Theatre.

We’d love to have YOU come speak at Ignite.

Submit your talk here

Ignite Seattle Artist-in-Residence, Scotto Moore’s gives us his latest work, “CPU” which he describes as “a cautionary tale about the dangers of modern neural malware.” Updating those virus definitions will never feel quite the same.

About Scotto Moore

Scotto Moore is a writer, director and technologist. You can find him at Scotto.org. His next play, “When I Come to My Senses, I’m Alive,” will be at the Annex Theatre April 23 – May 22, 2010.

Some praise for CPU:

• “tweeting grinds to a halt as the ignite digital fairy tale told by scotto moore holds people spellbound at #gnomedex”
• “Last Ignite speaker Scotto Moore offers a very entertaining Charlie Kaufman-esque talk. Great!”
• “Awesome last Ignite talk – human as virus-hobbled computer. Moving.”
• “Loving the last Ignite talk. Absolute best of the series IMO.”

Yoram Bauman, a standup economist, deconstructs Greg Mankiw’s 10 Principles of Economics. In short order Yoram explains away tradeoffs, incentives, margins and markets. They become more common concepts of choices, people, governments, and stupidity (and limits of stupidity).

Greg Mankiw clearly doesn’t take this too personally, he blogged about Yoram twice, and by his own estimation, may have sold a few more books for him.

Editor’s Note: Much of this post was borrowed liberally from Brady’s post on the main Ignite web site.

About Yoram Bauman

Yoram has a Ph.D in Economics and has decided to use humor to convey his thinking. His first book The Cartoon Introduction to Economics: Volume One: Microeconomics comes out in January.

You can find Yoram Bauman on his blog, Stand-Up Economist, his blog at the Seattle PI or at his day job as the environmental economist for the University of Washington’s award-winning Program on the Environment.

Summer’s almost over and we’ve packed up the kids and sent them to school, returned from Burning Man, and are gearing up once again for our next Ignite Seattle.

For this fall’s edition, we’re trying something new: planning ahead. We’re opening submissions today for our next Ignite Seattle which will take place on December 1st at the King Cat Theatre. Help us turn over a new leaf by getting your submissions in well before the October 19th deadline.

Submit your talk. We ♥ early submissions.

We look forward to seeing you all on December 1st!

Scrabble isn’t a game of who can get the best 6 letter words. It’s a game of points and squeezing 2 letter terms into corners. Mehal Shah takes us through clean (and sometimes dirty) ways to win at Scrabble.

Some of his tips include:

• Thinking of Scrabble as a numbers game, instead of a word game
• Learning how to double the value of every tile you play
• Shutting down the board and holding on to every point you can get
• Learning how to bluff effectively
• Learning how to fake a bluff effectively
• Using your opponents knowledge to trick them
• Using foreign languages to psych out your opponent

About Mehal Shah

Mehal Shah is a software engineer at Amazon.com. You can find Mehal on his blog, on Twitter and his photos on Flickr. Mehal did a great post about his experience speaking at Ignite.

(Note: most of this post was gratuitously copied and pasted from Brady’s post on Ignite.orielly.com)

Here’s a Flickr slideshow of all the photos from the Ignite Seattle photo pool with the tag, Ignite Seattle 7, sorted by interestingness. If you took photos at Ignite Seattle, please add them to our Flickr pool.

Videos of Ignite Seattle 7 will be posted soon.

Here are a few upcoming tech events in Seattle. If you’ve got a geek event that you think might interest the Ignite Seattle crowd, let us know!

Tonight!

Seattle Tech Startups
This month’s topic: Monetizing Your Product

• Chris Hopf, Pricewire.com: Understanding Freemium – How to Create and Grow Paying Customers
• Tony Wright, RescueTime: Making Money with a Software Startup: In the Trenches.

Next Week

Social Media Club Seattle – August 18th
From the SMC Seattle site

This month’s Social Media Club Seattle meet-up is coming up, and we hope you’ll join us on August 18th in Seattle at the HL2 offices. This month’s SMC Seattle event includes a memorable social media discussion with Brad who tweets from @Starbucks, Elliott who tweets from @AlaskaAir, and Frank who tweets from @ComcastCares. We’ll have an hour-long program and plenty of time for networking and sharing social media best practices.

Great presentations and networking for the social media set.

Gnomedex – August 20-22nd
Chris Pirillo and the Gnomedex crew put on a heck of show every year here in Seattle and this year is no exception. This year’s speakers include two Ignite alumni, Beth Goza and Amber Case (Ignite Portland) as well as Ignite founder, Bre Pettis. Other speakers include Chris Brogan, Drew Olanoff (#BlameDrewsCancer), and Mark Glaser.

Gnomedex is the premiere geek event in Seattle

Tech Calendars

Having trouble keeping up with the latest local events? Here are a few local calendars that can help keep you up to date.

• Seattle Tech Calendar
• Social Media Club Event Calendar
• Seattle 24×7
• Seattle 2.0 Events

Despite temperatures rising a little higher than we would have liked, Ignite Seattle 7 was certainly our biggest and may have been the best Ignite Seattle yet.

Attendance-wise, we broke a record, with just a hair under 700 people in attendance. Additionally, we had a bunch of folks watching our first ever live video stream (courtesy of Bryan Zug at Lilipip).

Ignite 7 around the web

Great event summary from Anthony Stevens – Ignite Seattle 7 Recap and Review
Randy Stewart – Ignite Seattle 7 in Photos
Ted Leung – Flickr photoset

• Building Blocks Show – Ignite Seattle 7 Complete with Food Enthusiasts
• Seattle Metblogs – Monday Agenda: rumble, ignite

From our speakers

• Todd Sawicki – How I Learned to Like Ballet (Being Married to a Professional Ballet Dancer) – A Primer on Ballet
  
• Deepak Singh – Bite sized Big Data
• Lee LeFever – Speaking at Ignite Seattle August 3rd
• Matthew Amster-Burton – More Monkey than Ever

Thank you

Thank you to everyone who spoke at Ignite 7. We couldn’t have Ignite without fantastic speakers and we are privileged to have funny, intelligent (and brief) speakers who are willing to entertain and inform us.

Finally, thank you to the audience who brought their friends, told their relatives and snuck out of the house on a Monday night just to join us. Our speakers would be talking to themselves without you Seriously though, the best thing about Ignite is that YOU could be one of our next speakers.

We’ll be back in the fall for the next Ignite event. We’ll keep you posted on the blog and on Twitter as to the exact date. Until then, we’ll be posting videos of last night’s event to fill the void.

Here’s a great talk from the last Ignite to warm you up for tonight’s Ignite 7 event.

Why does software suck so bad? Is it possible that a lot of us really smart computer programmers are, in fact… incompetent? Ron Burk, with his wry style, asks the hard questions about hiring, firing and working with incompetence in the software industry in this talk that went viral on YouTube.

About Ron Burk

Ron is the former editor of Windows Developer’s Journal and author of the upcoming book “The Pop Psychology of Programming.” You can find Ron Burk on his blog.

Ignite Seattle 7 is tonight! As always we have a great crop of speakers talking about a variety of geek topics. The doors to the King Cat Theatre open at 7:00. The talks start at 8:30 PM. We are going to have a massive Rock-Paper-Scissors contest at 8:00.

Set 1 – 8:30pm

Yoram Bauman – Principles of economics, translated
Translates for a lay audience the 10 principles of economics from Harvard professor Greg Mankiw’s best-selling textbook.

Mandy Sorensen (mandercrosby) – What To Do With 60 Minutes in Whale (and How I Learned to Use a Machete!)
Ever wondered what to do with a half-alive beached whale on a remote island in the Pacific?

Daniel Westreich (danielwestreich) – Causal inference is hard; or how I learned to stop worrying and love counterfactuals
The philosophical and practical problems of causal inference, and how to overcome these problems using randomized trials. With particular application to medical literature and epidemiology more generally.

Lee LeFever (leelefever) – Where Goldfish Come From
Everyone knows goldfish and koi, but very few have ever thought about where they come from – how they are bred, raised, transported, etc. I know these things like the back of my hand.

Rob Gruhl – How to Take Better Pictures
The person who taught you how to buy a car is going to teach how to take beautiful photos.

Vanessa Fox – (@vanessafox) – Life’s Too Short To Eat Bad Food
And you certainly don’t want to feed bad food to your friends. Achieve deliciousness in just about the time it takes to give an Ignite talk.

Todd Sawicki (sawickipedia) – How I learned to Appreciate Dance Being Married to a Ballerina
Often times we see talks about how spouses deal with being married to geeks and startup jocks, now its time to turn the tables. This is a talk on what I’ve learned about ballet and how to appreciate it being married to a former professional ballerina. Hopefully you too will be able to tell the difference between a first and fifth position and a Plié vs. a Passé. Even a geek can learn to love classical dance.

Dan Shapiro (danshapiro) – Making Benjamin Fly: Geeking out aero-style for about a hundred bucks
When I was a kid, RC flight meant spending thousands of dollars to put what was essentially a slightly-aerodynamicized lawnmower in the air. You spent thousands on engines and electronics and balsa, months building your plane, crashed it your first flight out, and then repeated. Over, and over, and over again. Enter lithium polymer batteries, rare earth magnets, miniaturized solid state inverters, 2.4 GHz spread spectrum frequency hopping transmitters and receivers. What do you get? I’ll show you. And I’ll show you how to get it up, for about one benjamin.

Mehal Shah (mehals) – Fighting Dirty in Scrabble
Are you tired of your family thrashing you at Scrabble? Do you wince when someone brings out that red box at board game night? Are you ready to wipe the smug grin off the face of your significant other who pulls 7-letter words out of nowhere?

Jessica Hagy (thisisindexed.com) – Lies To Ignore
Graphs can contain both Truth and Deception.

Set 2 – 9:30 PM

Scotto Moore – CPU
Our artist-in-residence, is back with another digital fairy tale.

Lauren Bricker (brickware) – Geek Generation
Don’t call me a teacher, I’m more of a Geek Generator. I have kids (9 and 18), both who love computers and yes, they’ve already learned how to program. But apparently that wasn’t enough for me. For the last two years I’ve been teaching computer science at a local private high school. It’s incredibly interesting, rewarding, and yes, a lot of work. My goal with this talk is to generate more Geek Generators.

Elan Lee (elanlee) – I Wish I Was Taller
I filed a bug on my life with a major software company in Redmond.

Willow Brugh (willowbl00) – Creating Communal Creative Space
The experience of building a maker space from scratch is certainly a project – I’ll talk about my experience in doing so, what advice others have shared with me, and what spaces like this are already available in Seattle (and perhaps elsewhere on the West Coast).

Gregory Heller (gregoryheller) – What Makes The Greenest Cab?
Green transportation is all the rage these days, especially hybrid vehicles. Popular wisdom may lead some, including civic leaders and politicians to believe that the greenest vehicle is a hybrid. NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg has been fighting to Green the Yellow Cab fleet in that city by forcing all new cabs to be hybrids. The iconic NYC TaxiCab often sets the pace for the rest of the country’s cabs. However would hybrids in NYC really make green cabs? And would the rest of the country’s cab industries follow suit? The answer may surprise you.

Mónica Guzmán (moniguzman) – Addiction! Staying afloat in the age of the stream
Glued to email, your RSS reader or Twitter? Has your hand grown by 133 grams and the approximate weight of an iPhone? The Web is a stream, and it’s easy to drown. Tips, tricks and cautionary tales from a reporter who swims the stream to stay on top of local news, but has learned the hard how easy it is to get carried away.

Deepak Singh (mndoci) – Big Data and the networked future of science
New instruments, sensors, distributed scientific collaboration, informal publication channels = lots of data. How do we crunch it? How do we share it? How do we distribute it? This talk will dive into (a very very fast dive) into the challenges and solutions of the big science of today and tomorrow. Exascale anyone?

Matthew Amster-Burton – (@mamster) What is Baby Food?
Sushi, stew, and spicy enchiladas for babies, from the author of Hungry Monkey: A Food-Loving Father’s Quest to Raise an Adventurous Eater.

We’re excited to announce the final five speakers for Ignite 7, which will be held this coming Monday, August 3 at the King Cat Theater.

The Final Five

• Jessica Hagy (thisisindexed.com) tells us which lies to ignore.
• Rob Gruhl, the person who taught you how to buy a car is going to teach how to take beautiful photos.
• Vanessa Fox – (@vanessafox) brings the SEO expert’s guide to food.
• Scotto Moore, our artist-in-residence, is back with another digital fairy tale, “CPU.”
• Matthew Amster-Burton – (@mamster) a local food writer talks about raising a foodie.

Here’s the list of previously announced speakers for Ignite 7.

We look forward to seeing you on Monday!

We grew up watching medical droids, tricorders and stasis chambers as mainstays in futuristic medicine but it wasn’t that long ago that bionics, the hypospray and telemedicine were also merely science fiction. While there aren’t many open APIs or much rapid product development, the IT revolution hasn’t left the medical industry behind completely.

Chris DiBona takes us on a tour of the near future with his visit to the annual American Telemedicine Association Exposition and talks about the state of IT in the latest medical gear.

About Chris DiBona

Chris DiBona is the Open Source Programs Manager for Google, which includes running the Summer of Code, releasing open source software on Google’s Code website and contributing to several og Google’s blogs. He also helps plan the annual Sci Foo Camp with Tim O’Reilly and Nature’s Timo Hannay.

You can find Chris writing on his personal blog, Egofood or on Twitter @Cdibona in his spare time (spare time?).

Drawing from her real life as a stay at home mom, Jen Zug shares her parenting hacks to staying sane when the majority of her day is spent discussing the merits of Optimus Prime over Buzz Light Year.

Parenting may not be for everyone. Staying home may not be for every parent. But everyone makes choices they’re willing to sacrifice for, and we all find ways to cope when it’s no longer glamorous.

About Jen Zug

Jen Zug is a writer and a stay at home mom.

You can find Jen Zug at @jenzug on Twitter or her blog, This Pile. She is the boss of Ruthie and Thomas (and often Bryan) no matter what they tell you.