Sometimes I slip into a kind of disillusioned stupor and forget that well.... actually... oracle can be kind of cool from time to time. And cool in a way that's not just geek-cool but kind of hmmm... normal cool as well :)
One of the really neat things about running orablogs is that all kinds of random people from across Oracle email me about stuff from time to time. As a lowly developer (and believe me, developers sometimes feel pretty lowly in Oracle compared to other more windswept career path followers in our fine and burgeoning corporation), I would never normally hear about the fantastic stuff that we're doing in the real world down under, the trumendous committment of Oracle University instructors in Brazil and the rest of Latin America, personal insights from some of the lead people from products like htmldb and ias, and the views of server tech developers in the CDC.
Running Orablogs sometimes makes me break out in a cold sweat because it takes a lot of time, it's so not what I'm supposed to be working on, and I'm verily terrified half the time that it's all going to come a-crashing down in an explosion of Oh-My-Word---Oracle-Legal-And-Or-Some-Senior-Vice-President-Are-Really-Not-Happy-This-Time-Ness . But sometimes people email me things that rock so much that I just don't care any more :)
Andrea Yolo, from Oracle's Broadband and Creative division has, in the last few months, emailed me about some of the most unmitigatedly cool things that Oracle are doing in the marketing sphere. In case you didn't know it already, corporate blogging is all a secret evil plot to do marketing in a new-fangled way, so I'm kind of interested to read about the stuff that Andrea and her team are doing.
During OracleWorld (now that I'm living in downtown San Francisco, I'm amused to see signs all over the Moscone Center downtown, still welcoming punters to OracleWorld, which finished some time in early December), Andrea let me know about some of the cool things that the broadband and creative team were doing to promote that event. One of the ideas she had was to have one of the regular contributors to Orablogs do a video blog at the conference... that didn't work out, but there sure was plenty of other cool creative stuff on the web during the conference nevertheless.. Hmm maybe a video blog is on the cards for JavaOne or OracleWorld this year?... If you're an orablogger and you're interested in such a thing, let me or Andrea know :)
Anyway a few days ago Andrea emailed me about one of the most cutting edge projects her team has been involved in recently. I was all prepared to be geek-fest-marketed out by some grid computing thing, but lo'... actually Andrea sent me a link to Team Oracle EXTREME, and I sat for about half an hour and said... yeep. That. Is. Very. Cool.
On this site you can see an awesome video of some dude whose office is generally upside down, ten feet above the ground and moving at around three hundred miles per hour.
Team Oracle is a pretty cool thing.
