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I’m very much looking forward to the next Geek Out Summit /slash/ self birthday gathering at Monkey Town HQ later this month. What better way to close out the 4-day Thanksgiving weekend than to indulge yourself in some geeky mental stimulus?

The Details:

Date/Time: Sunday, November 26th at 8PM
RSVP: recommended but not necessary; send me an Email; Please forward onto friends!
Place: MonkeyTownHQ; 53 N 3rd St (Wythe & Kent); Williamsburg, Brooklyn; Great dinner menu & drink selection
Map | About the GOS

Itinerary:

Silvio – Aging Agents and how to slow them down

Over the past three generations life expectancy in the US has grown a stunning 20%. Will this keep rising? Will our grandchildren live to be 100+ on average? Silvio will discuss efforts & research in the academic medical industry that are identifying aging agents (say that fast three times) and how to slow them down.

Jonathan - Online Identity Aggregation , Misdirection & Sleight of Hand - FindMeOn.com

Internet users increasingly collect 'identities': online accounts, social network / forum profiles, blogs, email addresses and the like... On their own, these identities are disparate entities- but when cross-referenced against one another, multi-dimensioned personalities and complex webs of chained friendships emerge. The talk is planned to compare and contrast the new project FindMeOn ( which was originally developed to link indie rock band websites together ) with open source and commercial identity management / aggregation tools-- stressing the importance of Open Standards , Identity Abstraction / Privacy , and Verifiability / Reputation.

Matt – HIV Immunology & Medications

Think you know HIV and AIDS? Where did HIV came from, and how does it actually work? We'll take a look at the immunology of HIV, and what programs are out there currently (and why they work and don't work). Come find out more!

Greg – A tour of the Universe

Greg will give us a guided tour of the cosmos using some very cool astronomy software. During this presentation, we will plunge deeply into our seats and use Monkey Town HQ’s amazing projection capabilities to take a tour of the cosmos. Greg will guide us though the tour giving us interesting tidbits along the way.

Hope to see you all there!!!

An interesting advent in digital music has occurred over the past few years, and it’s only over the past year that the technology has become stable enough for the mass market – music subscription services, or what I refer to as “leasing”. This is basically the ability to download music onto a portable device (for a monthly feel) and listen to it on the go.

Service such as Rhapsody, Napster, Yahoo Music, and new kid on the block Microsoft’s Zune Marketplace provide these services. What’s the benefit? You can download any song from the respective catalog. Using Rhapsody for almost a year now, I’m able to get 9 out of 10 obscure recommendations and mostly anything in release. For a monthly fee, I have access to all the music that shaped my musical outlook as well as a broad world of yet unexplored artists.

But why lease vs buy? The whole digital music purchasing act left me feeling kinda empty. No CD case to open, nothing tangible to add to a collection, no small square book to read on the train, nothing, just an email confirmation in my junk mail box and a line item on my credit card bill. Plus, hard disks die and when was the last time you opened a five year old file anyways? How much of that music that you purchased do you listen to? Seriously…

This may also move us into the next Apple vs. PC/Microsoft/Windows battle. iTunes has been against the business model of subscriptions while Windows based devices and services have embraced it, specifically due to Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM technology. It’s just sad that Zune does not support this DRM technology, it’s especially ironic since historically, Microsoft built it’s dominance on Windows supporting hardware from almost any manufacturer and now it won’t support a DRM standard that’s been embraced by so many services and other digital player manufacturers. And I thought the enemy of MS’ enemy is their friend…

It’s interesting the way information propagates around the internet. After registering geekoutsummit.com with Google and the “other” search engines, I did some searching to see if anything actually comes up and was I surprised! In addition to the following three mentions, a friend of mine left me a voicemail telling me that the GOS is featured in Paper Mag’s “pm (NYC)” Tips for Today section. I must admit that I admire the concise write-up done by the Editor so much that I will be lifting the approach for the next summit  Here it is in brief:

“Indulge your nerdiest impulses tonight at MonkeyTown, where the obsessive dissection of random topics is deemed positively hip. This week, brush up on your knowledge of the rising life expectancy in America, internet personalities, HIV immunology, and the cosmic universe. A DJ and red velvet cake will follow the four short presentations. Polish your pocket protectors people!”

The other honorable mentions as found on google:

http://www.uncoolkids.com/2006/11/26/geek-out-summit/
http://shitparade.blogspot.com/
http://brooklyn.untilmonday.com/event/the_geek_out_summit

And ofcourse, the MonkeyTownHQ entry:

http://monkeytownhq.com/geekout2.html