Show Your Inner ‘NERD Outwardly

By Jake • August 26th, 2009 • 23 Comments

You know you want one

You know you want one

Update: Realized after posting that I assumed you all knew why Chet should be at OOW. For one, he’s an unabashed Oracle cheerleader, and a savvy APEX and database guy, just the kind of guy who loves to chat about all things Oracle. His head would probably explode during a week at OOW.

Two, he’s a great blogger, mixing real content with his personality and engaging his readers.

Third, he’s covered conferences. Check his numerous (13 at least) posts from COLLABORATE 09 for samples.

Finally, he’s a fun guy to have around, and that meat-life interaction with people you see infrequently is a big part of OOW.

As you may have read, Chet, the ORACLENERD, has stated he won’t be able to attend OpenWorld in October.

He cites what I expect is a common theme this year, financial reasons. He had intended to join the biggest Oracle shindig of the year as a blogger, using the blogger program free pass.

Of course, if you read Chet’s blog, you’ll know his financial woes have a backstory; his young daughter Kate nearly died a couple years ago and continues to defy the huge odds stacked against her. We may have a blame-meme spinoff on our hands, blaming Kate’s SLOS (Smith-Lemli-Opitz syndrome), instead of Drew’s Cancer, which may have reached critical mass.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, so why not spread it to someone in our own little community?

Anyway, Justin, Mr. OTN himself, has started a campaign to send Chet to OOW. It’s pretty simple; just adorn yourself with a handsome ORACLENERD shirt to let everyone know that you’ve proudly embraced your inner Oracle nerdliness.

Help the ORACLENERD get to OOW

The shirts come in black-on-white (action shot) and white-on-black versions and be sure to send Chet an action shot to add to his collection of ORACLENERDs in the wild. These shirts will be the must-have item at #oow09, so get yours now (Update: Changed the link to point to another vendor which gives him bigger margins, and as John points out in comments, offers more color options.) I can’t wait to see action shots from the conference.

Chet tells me his margins are pretty tiny, so outfit the whole family because we all know travel ain’t cheap. He may investigate other vendors, stay tuned.

As it stands today, I’m unlikely to be at OOW to behold the sea of ORACLENERD shirts that I expect will flood the Moscone Center, the surrounding hotels, bars, restaurants and streets.

Want to help Chet? Buy a shirt, re/tweet the campaign (track the retweet meme), blog about it, send him money, put him up at your pad in the Bay Area, fly him on your private jet, etc.


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  • http://only4left.jpiwowar.com jpiwowar

    The new site also offers more color options. I have a red ORACLENERD shirt headed my way. Don't know if it's Oracle-red exactly, but it's the thought that counts. ;-)

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Oh yeah, so it does, along with a bunch of other color options. The font isn't Courier though. Oh well.

  • http://oraclenerd.com/ chet

    I had to choose Futura, as they didn't offer Courier (go figure). They had American Typewriter, but the font ended up being way too small…

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Well, I guess if people want the big Courier version, they can buy three to match the margin of the other company :)

  • http://piontekdd.blogspot.com/ piontekdd

    Where are these color options>? I only see black and white.

  • http://only4left.jpiwowar.com jpiwowar

    IIRC, once you pick on the style of shirt (men's or women's), one of the subsequent pages should have a dropdown to allow color selection.

  • http://piontekdd.blogspot.com/ piontekdd

    Ahh, yes,Ii see it now, sort of unintuitive from a UI perspective. Chocolate is on the way. Dare to be different :) I've been thinking of ways to steel Chet's idea.

    oracledweeb
    oracleoaf
    oracletechie
    oracledolt
    oraclefool
    or to to go with Anglophile nature:
    oracleboffin

  • joel garry

    Awright! Royal blue, to match the blue m&m shirt I just got in Vegas. Hmmm, I've wanted a cdos shirt for a long time…

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Imitation as flattery, I like it.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    It's going to be sweet to get a group pic of all the colors of the 'NERD rainbow. Now we need to keep the meme (and the shirts) going . . .

  • http://oraclenerd.com/ chet

    i'm working on a new adjective to describe my feelings…it might be rated R. Working on a photo collage now of all the “in the wild” shots I have.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    You need a public Flickr group!

  • http://piontekdd.blogspot.com/ piontekdd

    the ORACLENERD Facebook Fan Page should be sufficient enough, no? Oh wait, it's a Group. I say Chet needs to ditch the group and create a fan page. :)

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    +1 for a fan page, but I typically prefer Flickr for photos, although a fan page would work too.

  • http://twitter.com/oraclenerd oraclenerd

    well that sucked, maybe this will work:

    http://picasaweb.google.com/chet.justice/ORACLE…

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    What sucked? You can post my OS X-ified one too. It's a little funny.

  • http://oraclenerd.com/ chet

    weird…one of my posts got left out.

    i had tried to use the embed tags in the comments…which apparently didn't work.

    weird one is in.

  • http://theappslab.com Jake

    Disqus flagged that as spam, doubt that embed is supported due to injection issues.