IT Insights Blog — certification

Many of us play board games. Because sometimes the cable company is doing maintenance on your street, and maybe your internet provider isn't working, and possibly aliens are hovering directly above the house and disrupting all forms of connecting to Netflix or logging on to Angry Birds or Farm Heroes. And when all of that is going on, well, what are you gonna do, read a book? Those are the moments that Settlers of Catan was made for.

Seasons, at least for those of us who do not live at the equator, or in Antarctica, or atop the vast expanse of sea ice that blankets the Arctic Ocean, are an important part of life. For example, if summer never ended, then many of us would have extremely high utility bills from operating both the sprinkling system and the air conditioner throughout the entire year. Or, you know, maybe we'd just decide to be sweaty and miserable and let the lawn dry out and die.

Some of you out there have probably watched the "old" TV show Star Trek: The Next Generation. It's a successor to the even older TV show Star Trek. By the way, are we overexplaining this? It's hard to know. There are still Star Trek spinoff shows in production, after all, even if the newest (and only current) iteration of the long-lived franchise is locked up behind a paywall at CBS.com where only subscribers can actually watch it.

There's a popular drinking game that doubles as a mixer, of sorts, to help party guests get to know each other. Players are seated in a circle. Whoever is taking the first turn says, "Never have I ever," followed by a short description of something that he or she has never done before. Everyone in the circle who has done that thing takes a drink, or eats an M&M, or does whatever other thing the players have agreed on.

There's a familiar saying that the only two things in life that are certain are death and taxes. But what if you live in Texas, for example, where there is no state income tax? Or what if you're a massive corporation that pretends to be based in Ireland to avoid settling up with Uncle Sam? Then the only thing that's certain is the cold embrace of death. And for a lot of people, death only comes at the end of very long life. And then it's like, "What took you so long?"