OK — I butchered the headline. This blog is not the New York Times, and my only editor is the slightly fuzzy one between my ears. I just had to find some creative way to express how AWESOME the Ignite Seattle 5 event was last night at the Capitol Hill Arts Center. I haven’t had that much fun in a dark room full of men on Capitol Hill since [REDACTED]. Ha ha ha!

But seriously, the crowd was probably 85% male, 15% female, which in terms of geek events has to win Brady some sabermetrician’s award for gender balance.

First: a shout out to all my skillbit and twitter friends I saw at the event: Brian, Rob, Adam, Jocelyn, Amir, Leo, Matt, Lindsay, Leigh, Deepak, Adam, and Anders. I’m forgetting one or two. Nice to see everyone!

Next, to the talks themselves: This is a fantastic format. It makes PowerPoint fun again! The presenters have a fixed amount of time per slide and so as you’re listening to their presentation your brain is engaged with this meta-level analysis of how they’re doing relative to the clock. It definitely keeps you interested.

You can go online in a couple weeks and view the video. For now, I’m going to give out a few “Xideys” to my favorite presentations:

• MOST INFORMATIVE: This is a tough category, as there were many, many good presentations here. I’ll call it a tie between Noah Iliinsky, speaking about complex diagrams, and Adam Philipp, talking about patents, but really, all of them were informative.
• MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING: Jordan Andersen, talking about opinion systems.
• MOST INSPIRATIONAL: This one has to be Ramez Naam’s talk on bottoms-up market democracies. I’d like to meet Ramez; he seems like a really interesting and engaged person.
• MOST FUN: Another close contest between Ryan McMinn’s hilarious Geek Dating Guide, and VJ Vijai’s talk on Hacking the Technical Interview.

I’ll definitely be back for the next Ignite event. Props to Brady Forrest for throwing such a great event.