IT Insights Blog — holiday

There are lots of different things in life that we periodically replace or renew. Underwear, for example. There's probably no need to explain the rationale behind this practice. Just know that, if you haven't been changing your underwear often, well, you should probably make a different choice. Doing it every day would be ideal, but you ought to at least consider attending to this rather routine item of personal hygiene management a couple of times per week.

We've spoken out here before about the damage done — both to IT certification as a whole and to individual careers — by exam candidates who cheat to pass a certification exam. Most people in certification can probably empathize with anyone experiencing the various stresses that cause people to resort to gimmicks and shortcuts to pass an exam. Yet because of the ripple effects of cheating, a certification cheater really is the proverbial bad apple that spoils the whole bunch.

Humans have been aware of seasonal fluctuation in the number of sunshiny hours per day for thousands of years. The loved-by-some, hated-by-others timekeeping scheme that we now call daylight saving time (DST), however, is a relatively recent innovation. A New Zealand entomologist named George Hudson first proposed the modern DST regimen in 1895, and it gradually caught on with nations around the world (including the United States, in 1918) over the next few decades.

It's been a wonderful 2018 here at the IT Insights Blog, and we're grateful to everyone who has shared it with us. We hope to see you all again in 2019!

The U.S. observance of Labor Day had its first formal stirrings in 1887, when Oregon became the first state to make Labor Day a darn tootin', sure-as-shootin' public holiday. They're nothing if not progressive in Oregon, which is also where the first one-way streets in a U.S. city were laid out, as well as being the (highly generalized) location of the first facility to successfully breed harbor seals in captivity.