IT Insights Blog — certification

When a political candidate wants to spread whatever message he or she is spreading, as well as meet people, shake hands, and build relationships, the candidate quite often travels from place to place and person to person. Pounding the pavement and pressing the flesh is a time honored approach to disseminating ideas and information and forging important connections with voters.

It was poet, biographer, and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Sandberg who wrote, "Sometime they'll give a war and nobody will come," a charming witticism that has echoed down through the ages. Here at TestOut Continuing Education, we enjoy a piquant commentary as much as the next bystander

Hackers have a pretty tarnished reputation and, if you think about it, that's probably always been the case. Has "hacking" anything really ever been looked on as being productive, positive, or beneficial? Prior to the information age, "hacking" was probably most often something done with machetes and, before that, swords. And unless you were say, hacking your way through dense jungle foliage, there's a pretty good change that what was getting hacked was human limbs.

Back in the 1880s and 1890s, the era, in the United States, of the first transcontinental railroads, poor workers used to follow rail lines from place to place in search of a job, a handout, or something better than whatever they'd left behind. A culture gradually grew up around these disadvantaged wanderers that persists to this day. Something about so-called "hobos" fires the imagination, and almost everyone is at least passingly familiar with bits and pieces of hobo lore.

Spring is just around the corner, and that means that baseball players are, um, already shagging fly balls and taking BP. Hey, you think spring training can wait until, you know, spring is actually here? Not a chance. The Arizona-based Cactus League tossed out the first pitch on Feb. 21, while the Grapefruit League kicked off in Florida on Feb. 22. It's hardly reasonable to expect baseball players to be ready to play 180 games if they don't get started early.