IT Insights Blog — certification

Halloween began as a celebration of the western Christian feast of All Hallows’ Day. It was a time of year dedicated to the remembering of the dead, especially saints, martyrs and other departed faithful. Over the years, pagan influences built upon the religious foundation of All Hallows’ Day, leading to the modern-day Halloween celebration.

Every so often, something happens to remind you that you're not the spring chicken that you used to be. Everybody out there raise your hands if the last high school reunion that somebody told you about had a double-digit number assigned to it. Time passes all of us by, and usually this is right about the moment in discussions of this nature that we start to hear the opening chords of Bruce Springsteen's "Glory Days" spewing from our mental jukebox.

One of my favorite actors is Paul Giamatti. His performances John Adams and Cinderella Man are spot on. Whether screaming pugilistic encouragement to Russell Crowe or reluctantly accepting acting advice from a family of cinephiles, he always seems to sum the situation up with a sentence or two. In the 2015 disaster flick, San Andreas, Giamatti (son of former baseball commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti) plays Caltech seismologist, Dr. Lawrence Hayes.

Here in the United States there's about to be a presidential election. No, really, it's true. Those of us who live here can't stop hearing about it, sometimes even when all we want to do is peruse someone's ruminations about this or that facet of IT certification. One of the biggest news headlines at the moment is the persistent clamor from fully half of the candidates with a realistic shot at winning that the election is rigged.

I was at a high-school football game the other evening watching the home-town team get beat like a rented mule. They were down by 30 points at the half and it didn’t look like things were going to get any better for them. One of the coaches gathered the defense and led them in a cheer: “Good, better and best. Never stop trying until the good is better and the better is best!” The players seemed to respond like a different team. They completely shut down the opposing offense, giving up just two first downs the entire second half, and coming back to make a game of it.