Category: Speakers

Confessions of an Ignite Speaker

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

Where Goldfish Come From – Lee LeFever

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

Lee LeFever - Ignite Seattle 7When 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.

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)

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.

Tonight’s Ignite Seattle Line Up (8/3)

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.

Ignite 7 – The Final 5 Speakers

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

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

We look forward to seeing you on Monday!