Happy Saturday, everyone! Here on Global Nerdy, Saturday means that it’s time for another “picdump”: the weekly assortment of amusing or interesting pictures, comics, and memes I found over the past week. Share and enjoy!
Here’s what’s happening in the thriving tech scene in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, August 24 through Sunday, August 30!
This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:
✅ When the event will take place
✅ What the event is
✅ Where the event will take place
✅ Who is holding the event
Tuesday at 5:30 p.m. at Hidden Springs Ale Works (Tampa): It’s time for another TampaTech Taps & Taco Tuesday! It’s a friendly, casual get-together of Tampa Bay’s tech scene for conversations, great drinks, and (of course) free tacos!
Find out more and register here.
Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. at KForce (Tampa): It’s “Power and Perils of AI Aided Coding”, organized by Tampa Java User Group, with Tampa Bay AI Meetup! Dr. Venkat Subramaniam returns to Tampa to give another one of his amzing, engaging, and amusing talks on becoming better developers.
Find out more and register here.
Saturday morning at 10:30 at Luna Lux (St. Pete): When you’re often the only one in the room, being your authentic self takes deliberate work. A sustainable personal brand starts with knowing who you are, how you want to be perceived, what you’re working toward, and how to communicate your value. Navigating a tech career takes its own kind of blueprint, whether you’re a junior engineer, a seasoned VP, or a founder.
This brunch is for Black women in tech across the Tampa Bay area. We’re gathering to build a collaborative, high-trust circle where you can speak honestly, feel heard, and walk away with strategy.
Find out more and register here.
How do I put this list together?
It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.
In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.
What goes into this list?
I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:
Here’s my latest “back of the envelope” drawing, which I drew as a companion for a new NetFoundry series called Reachability Watch.
Published fortnightly, Reachability Watch covers the volume of new network-exploitable CVEs, the handful that clear a CVSS 8.6 bar, whatever KEV actually caused damage that period, and a running tally so the trend line becomes visible over time.
The drawing features this edition’s highlighted KEV. More formally known as CVE-2026-72898, it’s what I call “BYOK: bring Your Own Key,” because that’s essentially what the exploit does. You hand Metabase’s password-reset endpoint an extra user-id key it never asked for, nobody strips it, and it rides all the way into the SQL query.
Read it here:
https://netfoundry.io/reachability-watch/reachability-watch-cve-kev-tracker-2026-08-14/
Murphy’s Law strikes: Just before I’m about to leave for the weekly Tuesday happy hour for beer with the neighbors, the synth I ordered arrives. And a day early, too (this is beginning to sound like one of those “My steak is too juicy and my lobster too buttery” kind of complaints)!
The synth in question is pictured above: an FM-1 desktop synth made by a company called M-VAVE. For a mere US$79, it emulates the Yamaha DX7, the most 1980s of all the 1980s synths…
…but now in a package that’s slightly smaller than a VHS cassette.
I’ll post a review later, but since I have to run, I’ll post this guy’s review instead:
At this moment in time, I can’t think of a better way to promote an energy drink and a beer than by what Liquid Death and Garage Beer did: harnessing the pop culture power of worries about AI data centers’ water usage (with an inspired solution), ’80s ballads, and Jason Kelce.
I love how the ad brings all sorts of people together; even Juggalos (who along with the furries, will show us the way to a better future)!
Since that I posted that first article on August 16, 2006 to Global Nerdy, it’s been…
…and of course, one helluva blogging adventure!
I didn’t come up with the name; at least not directly. It was generated by a program I wrote, The Duke of URL, which demonstrated the “namespinner” API made by Tucows, where I was working as their developer advocate. You enter some keywords into the app, and it presented you with a list of suitable and available domain names.
One of the available domain names it presented was globalnerdy.com. The name was a little ridiculous; it sounded like the sort of thing made by whoever comes up with names for Japanese role-playing videogames. But it was kind of catchy and I decided to go with it.
To close (I’d love to write more, but today’s a busy day for me), some photos from this blog throughout the years…
Here are some of the AI articles and videos I’ve been looking at this past week:
and finally, the folks at Honest Government Ad do an ad for AI Data Centers: