Law Students

the nerd merit badges I?d make

By Luis

I like the concept of nerd merit badges- I even want the inbox zero one- but the execution is a little weak. Seeing this started me pondering on what I’d do if I were going to make my own.

The temptation, of course, is just to have a logo per organization- gnu, gnome, moz, fedora, etc. But the core of the merit badge idea is that you’re indicating skills learned, not organizations. (Yes, I’m an old boy scout on top of all my other nerdiness.) So I tried to think along those lines, and here are some of the skills I’d like to decorate my bag/laptop with:

• GTD: a david allen head, natch.
• emacs: emacs logo?
• bugmaster: old gnome bugsquad logo? (mosquito with crosshairs)
• infolaw: scales, or something (yeah, I know… pretty weak.)
• perl: a very short obfuscated perl program
• peer production: (because open source just isn’t right for some reason) (but hell if I know what that logo would be; nerdmeritbadge uses github’s octocat but that seems… weak)
• lego: you know it!
• family tech support: nerdmeritbadges has this one, and it isn’t a bad concept, but their logo for it is terrible.

I bet you could do a passable job of them with this cafepress option and some decent gimpery, but if people have decent suggestions I’m all ears. :)

Full post as published by Luis Villa's Home Page on August 11, 2009 (boomark / email).