IT Insights Blog — TestOut

Once a year in spring, usually about the time that summer is just around the corner, TestOut staffers can be found on their hands and knees digging thousands of small holes. It's not some sort of delayed celebration of Groundhog Day where we construct seasonal burrows for the prophetic earth-dwelling rodents. Rather, we team up with employees of Pleasant Grove, the Utah city where our home offices are located, to beautify locations around town.

It's good to give back. For thousands of years, humans have come together to create societies and communities that pool resources and combine efforts to create better conditions for living, laboring, leisure, and everything else that fills up the hours of the day and night. In the United States, there are typically four layers of government — city, county, state, and federal — that cooperatively provide a frankly amazing support structure that many of us take largely for granted.

There are many, many different conferences, conventions, and other gatherings that are themed around IT, education, or some combination of the two. Frequently, tech groups rope in celebrities (or at least "celebrities") to speak at such events. Former NBA MVP Shaquille O'Neal will be at CompTIA's ChannelCon event in August. Hero pilot Chesley Sullenberger will deliver the keynote address at (ISC)²'s Security Congress gathering in October.

About this time last year, intrepid TestOut account manager Wendy Edwards used some MoonPie snack cakes as a promotional giveaway at a conference. For those of you not in the know, a MoonPie is sort of like a jumbo s'more, only frozen in time instead of fresh from the campfire. The basic blueprint is two graham crackers (cut round), with a marshmallow pattie between them, with the whole thing dipped in chocolate. It probably either sounds delicious or repulsively sweet.

All the way back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, two crazy kids in love — actually two married corporate lawyers, but that's just not as vibey — moved from New York to Paris and a dream was born. While in Paris, Tim and Nina Zagat began to compile a list of their favorite local restaurants, keeping track of whether each was or was not worthy of future visits. The idea stuck and when the Zagats moved back to New York a few years later, they began compiling a list of New York restaurants.