Author: Randy Stewart

Geeking out aero-style for a hundred bucks – Dan Shapiro

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

Dan Shapiro - Ignite Seattle 7When 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.

Scotto Moore’s Digital Fairy Tale, CPU

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.”

Principles of Economics Translated – Yoram Bauman, Ph.D.

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.

Next Ignite Seattle – December 1st

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!

Fighting Dirty in Scrabble – Mehal Shah

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 - Ignite Seattle 7Mehal 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)

Upcoming Tech Events in Seattle

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.

Ignite Seattle 7 Recap

Ignite Seattle 5 - Mission Control
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

From our speakers

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.

Ron Burk on The Psychology of Incompetence

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 Burk - Ignite Seattle 6Ron 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.