As a result, at Gnomedex on Saturday morning, there’s going to be a “mini-Ignite Portland” with selections of popular talks from past Ignite Portland events. (This isn’t an official Legion of Tech event.) There’s also going to be a similar “mini Ignite Seattle” on Friday afternoon, with Brady Forest and his cadre of Igniters.

I somehow got roped into being the “emcee’, introducing the talks, etc (I’m not crazy about getting up on stage), but I hope to get through the intro quickly and sit down fast.

Rick Turoczy over at Silicon Florist has a writeup, with a list of the talks that will be featured, and you can see the “speaker bio” page for the talks on the Gnomedex site.

Here are the talks that are migrating north to Seattle:

• Kevin Fox – How To Buy a Car for Under $1000
• Mario Schulzke – Why Deutschland Loves David Hasselhoff
• Eva Schweber – How To Run a Startup and Not Lose Your Mind
• Vanessa Holfeltz – Boiling Water in 5 Easy Steps
• Jason Grigsby – Cup Noodle: Innovation, Inspiration, and Manga

The coolest thing about all of this? The idea for Ignite Portland was hatched at last year’s Gnomedex. They highlighted some of the previous evening’s Ignite Seattle talks, and I loved them. The energy and excitement were off the charts, and I immediately started thinking (and Twitter-ing) about how awesome it would be to do an Ignite event in Portland. Connections and plans were made, venues were filled to capacity, Legion of Tech was born, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Besides the obvious coolness of these talks, there’s something poetic about Ignite Portland making an appearance at Gnomedex. It goes to show that a lot of really cool things can happen in the space of one year!

I just put up a post on the ISN blog, about the history of SIGGRAPH and the ACM, and then waxing a bit philosophical about Larrabee and the future of computing as we know it:

I can’t shake the feeling that the Larrabee Architecture paper that was just published by the ACM, written mostly by Intel engineers, is one of those landmark events in computing. I’m really not trying to add to the hype that’s already surrounding Larrabee. There’s enough of that already. But it really is going to be a huge leap in computing. Imagine that in a couple of years, instead of having one, or two, or maybe four cores, your computer could have a Larrabee card with 24 or 32 (I’m guessing – this number isn’t final) programmable x86 cores that can be set to any task that benefits from massive parallelism (like, say, making that 3D game you’re playing look REALLY pretty and smooth), along with 8 “bigger” traditional Nehalem (I mean, Core i7) processor cores that do the things your current single or dual core processor does. Oh, and with Hyperthreading, all of those cores can run more than one thread, which makes them appear as even more “virtual” processors to the operating and software that use them.

How in the world are operating systems, applications, and games going to have to change to deal with this massive shift to many cores and many threads?

I’ll be posting more, and helping to get some videos of the cool stuff here at SIGGRAPH posted quickly to ISN’s video site, Take Five, so keep any eye out over there for any cool stuff I come across.

It’s things like this that make me love my job!

We’re having a “tweetup” at the bar in the Governor Hotel in Portland, starting at 8:30PM on Wednesday night, July 16. Charlene says if you bring your copy of Groundswell, she’ll sign it, and buy you a drink.

You can get the details on Upcoming (you can RSVP if you want, but this is way informal, so no guarantees, of course – it’s a bunch of people descending on a hotel bar). You can also see what the Twittersphere is saying about Charlene, the tweetup, and Groundswell on the spanking new search.twitter.com (formerly Summize, a.k.a. the best dang Twitter search engine out there, period). You know, in case you want to see if any of your friends are going to be there.

Hope you can make it!

Update: Bummer. Charlene’s flight got cancelled, and she’s not going to get into PDX until around midnight, so we had to cancel the tweetup. Sorry! You can see go see Charlene speak at the Internet Strategy Forum Summit tomorrow (Thursday), though.

If you’re coming, look for me and say “hi!”. I’ll be the geek in the cargo pants, black t-shirt, and bright orange Crocs. If you can’t make it, you can still partake in the parts of the event that will take place online (the backchannel chatter on Twitter, watch the videos tomorrow, etc.). I just put up a post on igniteportland.com with details on how to experience Ignite to the fullest.

I’m very proud to be one of the organizers of such a cool, popular event. The folks from Legion of Tech (a non profit organization we formed to manage organizing events like Ignite Portand, BarCamp Portland, Startupalooza, and the monthly LoT Happy Hour meetups) are awesome in every way, and I’m humbled and honored to get to work with them (I’m on the board). I can’t wait to see how IP3 turns out tonight, and I’m already looking forward to Ignite Portland 4!

The best moment of the night came when I was sitting in my seat, down in front, surrounded by people who had worked so hard to make this happen, and who had become good friends in the process. And we, in turn, were surrounded by all the amazing volunteers, speakers, and sponsors that made it even possible. And we were all in turn surrounded by a crowd of exited people, enjoying themselves in a very cool theater. It all just sank down on me right then, a warm, fuzzy, happy feeling. I realized that this was the coolest thing I have accomplished so far in my life.

So, here are some photos and commentary of how the evening went, from my point of view. I was the first to arrive at the Bagdad, at about 3:00 PM, to get set up. Plus, I had never been to the Bagdad, and I wanted to check the place out. It’s a beautiful building, and has a very cool “Portland’ vibe.

I was also surprised to see “Ignite Portland” up on the main marquee, since I thought we had asked them not to put it up there (we knew we didn’t need help drawing any more of a crowd!):

I went inside, and looked around before Todd, Dawn, and the others arrived. I fell in love with the Bagdad – it’s a very cool place. As you’ll soon see…

By about 4:00 PM, we got started setting up the short-lived registration area.

Right about then, we noticed that people had actually started lining up outside. One hour and 15 minutes before we officially opened the doors at 5:15 PM. You guys were hardcore! It was rainy and windy and COLD outside. I salute you and thank you, early line waiters!

We had a tremendous outpouring of volunteers – almost more than we could keep busy. One of the “nice” problems to have. Ann Marcus was the “chief volunteer wrangler”, and did an awesome job. But I can’t her in any of my pictures! I’ll make it up to you, Ann. Here are some of our other volunteers:

We had some food – appetizers, mostly – catered by the Bagdad (and the McMennamin’s restaurant there). And there’s also a bar, where in addition to drinks and theater popcorn, you can order a burger, fries, and other snacky stuff. The bar/food line was long all night, but it moved fast. If you ordered something other than a beer or wine, they’d give you a number, which you took back to your seat in the theater, and they’d run your order out as soon as it was ready.

The theater started to fill up quickly, and there was a definite buzz in the air. This is about when I started to get really excited and slightly euphoric.

By this time, the line was still so long, and we had so many people that hadn’t made it through registration that we made an executive decision to bypass registration, and just let people file in until the Bagdad cut us off and we were at full capacity.

I snuck across the street to take some pictures of the colorful marquee:

Before we knew it, we had reached capacity. We counted more than 750 people that made it in, and there were still 100 to 150 that got turned away. It really sucked to have to make people wait in a long line in the cold, and then to have to turn people away. But, on the positive side, that’s another one of those “nice” problems to have.

Every seat in the theater (580 total) was soon full. We knew we’d be “standing room only”, and boy was that the truth.

With that, we got started. We did the welcome/housekeeping items, which seemed to drag on a little longer than we thought they would when we were planning the agenda (we got feedback to that effect from lots of people, so we’ll make it better next time). The sponsors got to do their 30 second Ignite-style blurbs. My group, Intel Software Network, was a sponsor again, but my boss Bill couldn’t make it, so I stood in for him giving a little spiel about how ISN loves developers.

And then, we were off, directly into Scott Kveton’s “What is Ignite?” talk. I took lots of photos of the presenters and slides, but I haven’t processed them all yet, and may not post them at all, since video of all the talks was posted in less than 24 hours by the awesome, amazing A.J. (a.k.a. linuxaid). So check out this post over on IgnitePortland.com and watch the videos for yourself.

We also had John Hartman and the video crew from AlphaGeekTV, who not only provided a live video stream for people who couldn’t make it to the theater, but they also recorded the talks from various angles, and are going to edit them together all nice and fancy like. We’ll post those, when they’re ready, on the “Watch” page on IgnitePortland.com.

After 7 talks, we had a break to network and chat with everyone. We also did some door prizes with schwag from our sponsors. Someone even took Todd up on his tongue in cheek offer of a prize for anyone who came to Ignite on a first date (which he mentioned during the Oregonian interview as a joke, but hey!)

What’s up with Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant? Well, it turns out that in addition to being “Super Tuesday” for primary elections, and “Fat Tuesday”, the biggest party night of the year, that night, February 5, 2008, was the 20th anniversary of the “historic” WWF championship title match between Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant. Raise your hand if you remember that? Yeah, I do. I watched it. It was the most watched televised sporting event to date in 1988 when it happened. So we had a little fun with it. Ask someone who was there for details.

After the intermission, the last wave of seven talks took off, and they were just as awesome as the first. Adrienne Fritze’s talk on “Living a Made Up Life” was unexpectedly personal and touching, and there were moments where all 750+ of us were silent, hanging on Adrienne’s every word. Contrast that with the roaring laughter that overcame us when Mario Schulzke explained “Die Hasselhoff Conspiracy”, and you begin to get an idea of the breadth and variety of the talks that we had. And we only saw 14 of the 54 submitted ideas! There’s another one of those “nice” problems to have – way more cool, interesting, funny, informative, and amazing presenters and ideas than we could ever present in one night,

As the night wrapped up, I was floating on a high. So many people came up to me and said “hi”, shook my hand, complemented us on the event. I found myself actually speechless. I couldn’t find the right words to respond. I can’t recall that ever happening to me. And that’s why Ignite Portland 2 was one of the best nights of my life.

We have something really special here, and in the last couple of days, I’ve been absorbing and pondering that. From the few emails I’ve had with the other organizers, they feel about the same. So we’re going to work even hard to make future Ignite Portland events just as special. More special. And bring this awesome community driven, rooted-in-Portland spirit to other events. I can’t wait to see what comes next.