IT Insights Blog — TestOut Continuing Education

Perhaps the most important reason to get an IT certification is because of the knowledge and skills that you can acquire while doing so. Learning is always good and there is always more learning that you can do. Even Albert Einstein famously observed that, "The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don't know." Certification would be a worthwhile and praiseworthy endeavor even if you got nothing more out of it than to expand your understanding of IT and keep you learning skills sharp.

Just before the end of 2018, a movie called Bird Box debuted on Netflix. Based on our extensive research, consisting mostly of surfing around on Google for a couple of minutes, we have been able to determine that the movie is not really about either birds or boxes. It's more of a survival thriller thing about a monster or monsters whose appearance somehow causes people who look directly at it (or them) to experience a psychotic break and kill themselves. Ewww.

There's an old inspirational maxim that goes something like this: "Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve." Such is the power of assonance ... to cause pithy inspirational adages to linger in memory. The power of the mind to believe things into existence is, well, less readily demonstrable. Science fiction authors and others have been conceiving technologies beyond the grasp of modern engineering for generations, after all.

As explained by Starfleet captain and occasional rock climber James T. Kirk at the beginning of Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, the "most important reason to climb any mountain" is the root motivation for many, if not most, feats of human adventure and daring: "Because it's there." (Kirk is busy attempting to climb Yosemite's El Capitan.) A challenge exists, ergo I must overcome it. The impulse to prove ... something has inspired many a mountaineer to attempt the insurmountable.

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!