IT Insights Blog — TestOut Continuing Education

Welcome to October! We can probably all agree that the most exciting thing about October is the prospect of eating a lot of cheap candy and staying up late to watch scary movies. There will be office Halloween parties, costumes for revelers both young and old, and pumpkins with crooked grins and glowing eyes as far as the eye can see. If Netflix were really on the ball there'd be an all new Stranger Things, like, now, instead of probably sometime in March or April.

When discussing the overall state of information security, it's commonplace to suggest that everyone is at risk, and that hackers will eventually manage to get past anything put in place to stop them. Commentators frequently assert that the question is not whether this or that business or organization will be hacked, but when the hack will occur. It's a gloomy worldview that sometimes feels not just pessimistic, but wholly defeatist, in a "What's the use in even trying" sort of way.

There was a big scare in the pancake community earlier this year when International House of Pancakes announced that it had decided to officially change its name to International House of Burgers, making a one-consonant transition from IHOP to IHOB. Rarely has a single letter generated so thunderous an outbreak of hysteria and consternation. A month later, the IHOP braintrust was all, "J/K, LOL, U ppl R so fragile and unequipped to deal with our hilarious marketing stunt."

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.