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No Comments on What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, April 18, 2022)
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, April 18 through Sunday, April 24, 2022.
As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Anything I deem geeky
By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.
This week’s events
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
SCIPS, a 50+ Tampa Bay Singles Club
6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Beginning Web Development
6:30 PM to 9:00 PM EDT
Tampa – Sarasota – Venice Trivia & Quiz Meetup
9:00 PM to 10:30 PM EDT
Tampa / St Pete Business Connections
Time
Private Directors Association
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
Manatee River Business Exchange Club
6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
The Tampa Chapter of the Society for the Exploration of Play
6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Tampa Investor/Training Meetup
9:00 PM to 10:30 PM EDT
Wednesday, April 20
11:00 AM to 2:00 PM EDT
Christian Professionals Network Tampa Bay
11:30 AM
Success Strategies for Business Owners
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
Pasco County Entrepreneurs Meetup
6:00 PM to 8:00 PM EDT
DigitalDeLand
6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Continuous Improvement Network (CI Net)
9:00 PM to 10:30 PM EDT
Tampa / St Pete Business Connections
7:15 AM to 9:30 AM EDT
Professional Business Networking with RGAnetwork.net
9:30 AM to 11:00 AM EDT
Tampa / St Pete Business Connections
11:00 AM
Young Professionals of Tampa Bay Networking Group
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
Big Data and Analytics Tampa
6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Brandon and Seffner area AD&D Group
6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Network & Social – Tampa/St. Pete Networking Events
7:30 PM to 10:30 PM EDT
Masterminds Tampa Bay
9:00 PM to 10:30 PM EDT
Tampa Bay Atlassian Community Events
10:00 AM to 11:00 AM EDT
Central Florida’s Best Real Estate Investing Community
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
Networking Leads
12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EDT
Hillsborough Community College (HCC) – InLab
3:00 PM to 5:00 PM EDT
Meeple Movers Gaming Group
6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Toastmasters District 48
9:00 PM to 10:30 PM EDT
Saturday, April 23
8:00 AM to 4:00 PM EDT
Toastmasters Division G
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
Aniras Events LLC.
12:00 PM to 4:30 PM EDT
Lithia Chess Meetup Group
6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Nerd Night Out
9:00 PM to 10:30 PM EDT
Sunday, April 24
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
Orlando Adventurer’s Guild
2:00 PM to 5:00 PM EDT
Drunk’n Meeples West Pasco
2:00 PM to 4:00 PM EDT
Orlando Business Leadership and Development Meetup Group
6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Learn-To-Trade Crypto – Online (As Seen on Orlando Sentinel)
9:00 PM to 10:30 PM EDT
=== Mail ===
Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?
Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com !
Join the mailing list!
If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles. Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!
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I certainly hope they do. His move threatens to turn Twitter into early 2010s-era Reddit, when it was a cesspool of bigotry, disinformation, and that MAGA/QAnon test run called Gamergate.
Some thoughts:
His “free speech absolutist” stance is wrong. TechDirt’s recent article, Why Moderating Content Actually Does More To Support The Principles Of Free Speech, outlines why moderation actually enhances a community’s ability to have conversation, right from the first paragraph, which includes “Some of that involves legal requirements , some of it involves trying to keep a community focused , some of it involves dealing with spam , and some of it involves just crazy difficult decisions about what kind of community you want.”
What he truly cares about is his own free speech. Yours doesn’t matter. For example:
Journalist Stewart Alsop, who was a big enough fan of Tesla to order a Model X, wrote a post critical of the Model X launch event titled Dear @ElonMusk: You should be ashamed of yourself. The so-called “free speech absolutist” went out of his way to phone Alsop and let him know that he would no longer be getting that Model X as he had cancelled Alsop’s order.
Then there are the times the so-called “free speech absolutist” fired people for speaking their minds, including:
Existing
What does Musk use his freedom of speech for? Well, there’s the whole “pedo guy” thing, which didn’t add anything useful to a situation where people were racing against the clock in a search-and-rescue operation.
The only time he’s ever faced governmental consequences for things he’s posted on Twitter was when he was he was manipulating the market for his own gain. That tweet from August 2018 — “Am considering taking Tesla private at $420. Funding secured.” was him simultaneously playing to the retail investor crowd and the still-living-in-mom’s-basement crowd (and possibly the crowd where those two Venn circles overlap). As Quartz put it in their article, Elon Musk’s Twitter bid isn’t about free speech , “if Musk has gripes about free speech, they’re with the SEC and not the company he’s trying to acquire.”
The loudest people celebrating Musk’s potential disruption of Twitter are human trash fires, incredible dumbasses, and often an unholy combination of the two: Jack Posobiec . Lauren Boebert . Jim Jordan . Marjorie Taylor Greene . Monica Crowley . Vladimir Putin’s newest bestest buddy, Tucker Carlson .
I’ll end with an observation from my friend, LinkedIn Learning’s Morten Rand-Hendriksen , whom I know from my Microsoft days:
“Elon Musk taking #Twitter private could mean an end to content moderation and a return of the platform as fertile ground for extremism, white supremacy, harrassment, and disinformation. Or it could mean nothing. Either way, if this deal goes through, it’ll change the social media landscape in a very big way.”
A very big way, certainly. But a good one? I doubt it.
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No Comments on What’s happening in the Tampa Bay tech/entrepreneur/nerd scene (Week of Monday, April 11, 2022)
Here’s the list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, April 11 through Sunday, April 17, 2022.
As far as event types go, this list casts a rather wide net. It includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under the category of:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters (because nerds really need to up their presentation game)
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Anything I deem geeky
By “Tampa Bay and surrounding areas”, this list covers events that originate or are aimed at the area within 100 miles of the Port of Tampa. At the very least, that includes the cities of Tampa, St. Petersburg, and Clearwater, but as far north as Ocala, as far south as Fort Myers, and includes Orlando and its surrounding cities.
This week’s events
10:00 AM to 2:00 PM EDT
Young Professionals of Tampa Bay Networking Group
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
West Orange Comics & Video Games
6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Beginning Web Development
9:00 PM to 10:30 PM EDT
Tampa / St Pete Business Connections
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
Block Co-op – Crypto Blockchain Orlando & Beyond Club
6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Tampa Hackerspace
9:00 PM to 10:30 PM EDT
Wednesday, April 13
11:30 AM to 1:30 PM EDT
Professional Business Networking with RGAnetwork.net
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
Professional Women’s Meetup
6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Pasco County Entrepreneurs Meetup
9:00 PM to 10:30 PM EDT
Tampa / St Pete Business Connections
9:00 AM to 3:30 PM EDT
Suncoast Credit Union Micro Enterprise Development Meetup
11:00 AM
Young Professionals of Tampa Bay Networking Group
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
Women Who Code Tampa
6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Tampa Hackerspace
9:00 PM to 10:30 PM EDT
Friday, April 15
10:00 AM to 11:00 AM EDT
Tampa Bay Business Networking Happy Hour/Meetings/Meet Up
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
High Point Gamer
3:30 PM to 7:00 PM EDT
Clermont Nerd Games
6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Tampa Bay Gaming: RPG’s, Board Games & more!
9:00 PM to 10:30 PM EDT
Saturday, April 16
11:00 AM to 7:00 PM EDT
Tampa Drones Meetup
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
Lithia Chess Meetup Group
6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Kitchen Table Book Club: Year of Short Stories
9:00 PM to 10:30 PM EDT
Sunday, April 17
12:00 PM to 1:30 PM EDT
Dialogue and Human Experience.
6:00 PM to 7:30 PM EDT
Lithia Dungeons & Dragons And Gaming Guild
9:00 PM to 10:30 PM EDT
Do you have any events or announcements that you’d like to see on this list?
Let me know at joey@joeydevilla.com !
Join the mailing list!
If you’d like to get this list in your email inbox every week, enter your email address below. You’ll only be emailed once a week, and the email will contain this list, plus links to any interesting news, upcoming events, and tech articles. Join the Tampa Bay Tech Events list and always be informed of what’s coming up in Tampa Bay!
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No Comments on The Windows 95 launch is a cringey ’90s time capsule
Pleated khakis eveywhere! It’s true: we got our fashion cues from Jerry Seinfeld in the 1990s.
Yesterday was the 30th anniversary of Windows 3.1 — the version where Windows started to show its true promise — but the truly entertaining bit of Windows history is Blue OS Museum’s recent posting of the Windows 95 Launch show, starring Bill Gates and special guest host Jay Leno!
I put the video on another screen to use as background noise while editing some articles this afternoon and found myself unable to look away, as if I were watching Plan 9 From Outer Space or The Room. It’s a so-bad-it’s good time capsule of technology and popular culture.
Some observations:
Jay Leno’s schtick was a combination of his usual topical Tonight Show gags and of being someone who didn’t use a computer regularly. This may seem weird to present-day viewers, but you have to keep in mind that this was 1995, when having a computer in your home was still an unusual thing, and sound cards and CD-ROMs were still new features. The original Microsoft goal of “a computer on every desk and in every home” hadn’t been reached yet.
The video is definitely a news time capsule too — Jay cracked a lot of Bill Clinton and OJ Simpson jokes, and I wonder if the references are lost on younger viewers. Early in the video, when joking about the limited memory of the Altair 8800 (for which Microsoft wrote a BASIC interpreter when they were getting started), he joked that it had better memory than Rosa Lopez. The name rang a bell, but I had to Google her (she was OJ Simpson’s housekeeper, and called to be a witness at his murder trial).
It’s also a fashion and hair time capsule. A painful one.
Multimedia on a computer! This was truly possible for the first time on Windows 95 (or Macintosh ’89), which was perfect timing as I was entering the job market at the time and landed a job developing multimedia CD-ROM applications.
Pre-emptive multitasking as the new hotness — wow, we lived in the stone age!
MSN, as in the Microsoft Network, which was their answer to AOL. They’d pivot to the internet shortly afterward.
And oh, that bit near the beginning where the programmers talked about life (and lack of hygiene) during crunch time while working on Windows 95 was straight out of Douglas Coupland’s novel, Microserfs. The only difference is that the Microserfs characters dated more.
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