Friday, September 24, 2010

OOW 2010: Blogger Meetup - Part I

Part I - Part II - Part III - Part IV - Part V

There appears to be some kind of competition as a result of this years Oracle OpenWorld Bloggers Meetup. The prize is an Apple TV, which me thinks would be nice to have.

This year's event was sponsored by OTN, HP and Pythian (for the 2nd year in a row I believe).

Here are the rules:
1. the blog post must use as many names of people in attendance as possible.
2. the blog post must be readable. It needs to make sense to someone who wasn’t there. It must be a story and not a list.
3. the blog post must contain one other small tidbit of information about each individual that you’ll uncover during your “networking” as you weave your fascinating stories of the evening (like their blog name, a contact detail, favorite color, title, hobby, cat’s name, certification, what they were drinking, how much they had to drink…).
4. the entry must be posted by midnight on Sunday the 26th of September. Please reference this post in your blog and it should be automatically picked up by the blog engine and posted in the comment as a track-back (if it doesn’t appear in the comments for some reason — please do post the link in your comment!

This year's title:



So, something of a story huh? I should be able spin a yarn here.

I met Leighton Nelson [blog|twitter|LinkedIn] on the first day of the conference. We had been trading tweets for a few months now, and most recently I helped him find the Oracle client version installed on a machine by using tnsping. Twitter FTW! He's also from Jamaica and despite common perceptions, he does not have dreadlocks. Apparently not everyone from Jamaica has dreadlocks...go figure. Here's Leighton signing Dan Norris' shirt where I believe Leighton had just stabbed him...or not.

Since I just mentioned Dan [blog|twitter|LinkedIn], I might as well go on to him. I met Dan IRL last year at COLLABORATE. Nice guy who has a penchant for warm cheese curds (yuk?). He signed everyone's shirt "Dan The Exadata Man" or something along those lines. I'm pretty sure he had a beer in hand, what kind, I don't know. I do know that he likes a good glass of scotch at the end of the night...as we seemed to be together every single night. He honored me one night be wearing the offical v2 oraclenerd t-shirt and he also seems to have some kind of crush on me, or he was just aghast at the size of my skull.



Next it was Jason Arneil [blog|twitter|LinkedIn]. You may know Jason from his avatar:



This is him in real life, down at the far left:



Hopefully this isn't a Superman thing where I just gave away his true identity.

I was especially happy to meet Jason as he came up to me and told me how he admired and appreciated my postings on katezilla. It's really hard for me to express how much that meant to me...for this guy that only knows me online to share that with me...pure faxing awesome. Hopefully one of these days I can make it over to the UKOUG and meet up with him again. Thanks so much Jason.

OK, this post is running long...so I'm going to do a multi-part series. I wonder if that will count towards the Apple TV? Who cares. Writing this all down helps me cement the great people I met.

Part II - Part III

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