Event for geeks and tech lovers

Geek and tech lovers unite!

Ignite Seattle is a geek event that combines on-site geekery, sharing, and innovation (and drinking). The next one will be held upstairs at the CHAC on Tuesday, February 13th. The Make Contest will begin at 6:30; the Ask Later talks will begin at 8:30.

First Set of Talks (8:30 PM)

• Brady Forrest (O’Reilly Radar, Ignite!) - Greetings & Salutations
• Matthew Maclaurin - (Microsoft Research) - Programming for Fun/Children/Hobbyists/Hackers
• Elisabeth Freeman (Author in the Head First Series, Works at Disney Internet Group) -The Science Behind the Head First Books: or how to write a technical book that doesn’t put your readers to sleep
• Scott Kveton (JanRain) - OpenID
• Avi Geiger (Hardware Architect,Microsoft) - “Power Consumption of Home Computers and Incandescent Lightbulbs” (Brady’s note - trust me this is going to be an eye-opening talk)
• Ryan Stewart (ZDNet’s Universal Desktop;Threecast) - The Rich Internet Application Space: Everything from where AJAX fits to Apollo to WPF to the Flash Platform
• Nancy White (Full Circle Associates) - What the Bleep is a Community Technology Steward?

Second Set of Talks (9:30 PM)

• Hans Omli (Shoestring Ventures)- Elevator Pitches and Parallel Entrepreneurship
• Sarah Davies (Freedom For IP) - Share and share alike: GPL, Creative Commons, and the future of digital freedom
• Lars Liden (Teachtown) - Utilizing Web Technology to Help Children with Autism
• Kurt Brockett (Identity Mine) - A Look at Windows Presentation Foundation
• Marcelo Calbucci (Sampa) - Dr. Watson for AJAX
• Lee Lefever (The World Is Not Flat) - Adventures from a Year of Multimedia Travel Blogging: A few inspiring stories from a year of travel blogging across 29 countries that produced 500+ blog posts, 24 original videos and 14,000 photos.
• Barry Brumitt (Google) - MapReduce: Simplified Data Processing on Large Clusters

Third Set of Talks (10:30 PM)

• Ellie Lum (R.E.Load Bags) - “How R.E.Load Makes Their Bags”
• Leo Dirac (Rhapsody) - Transhuman technology trends and their implications for a theory of morality
• Deepak Singh (business|bytes|genes|molecules) - An Open Scientific Future
• Mike Acuri (Ontela) - Escaping the Empire: how to leave a big company
• Heater Ralph - Art or science? A multi-person pogo stick
• Jordan Mitchell (CEO, OthersOnline) - Distributed Social Networking and a New Metaphor for Search
• Corprew Reed (American Society for Information Science & Technology) - What the heck is the Pacific Northwest Chapter of ASIS&T?For more into check outIgnite Seattle's website, here

For more information about Ignite Seattle or their events, visit www.igniteseattle.com.

Seattle role in astronaut toilet technology?

From the L.A. Times:

The sordid saga of a love-struck, diaper-clad astronaut has transformed a somewhat obscure NASA undergarment into a cultural phenomenon. 

...

According to a 1998 Associated Press article, astronauts were outfitted with Depend adult diapers and an inserted pad called Rejoice, made by a Seattlecompany. 

But a spokesman for Kimberly-Clark, which makes Depends, insisted the product isn't used in space. And the Seattlecompany apparently went out of business. 

... 

A NASA spokeswoman said the official brand used now is Absorbencies, manufactured by a company that has folded. 

Fortunately, NASA owns a huge stockpile. The agency snapped up 3,200 of the diapers about 15 years ago, the spokeswoman said, and "we still have about a third of the supply left." 

On space shuttle missions, each crew member receives three diapers — for launch, reentry and a spare in case reentry has to be waved off and tried later.