IT Insights Blog — training

Don't look now, but NASA just landed a spacecraft on Mars. Somehow, news of the landing broke Monday and Tuesday with (more or less) zero fanfare. Which is odd, considering that we just completed a successful process that involves flinging a spacecraft way up into the exosphere, piloting it across hundreds of millions of miles of deep space, and safely getting it down to surface, intact ...

Every now and then each of us encounters a workplace situation where we don't have all of the facts. Sometimes we aren't really paying attention to circumstances and end up missing small details. Perhaps sometimes we don't get far enough into a given scenario to become familiar with all of its parameters. At times we may be blinded by preconceptions that prevent us from fully understanding the correct manner in which to proceed.

She's a little bit country, and he's a little bit rock and roll. They're both a little bit beyond that golden No. 50. And way back in 2009, when they first became featured entertainers at the Flamingo Las Vegas resort hotel and casino, the gig was supposed to last for a little bit more than a month — six weeks, to be exact. Here it is 10 years later, and Donny and Marie Osmond are finally winding down and preparing to exit the stage.

If there's one animal that we associate with stubbornness, it would definitely be the, um, male donkey. (Yes, smart guy, there's another word for that.) Some might say "mule," and indeed the word "mulish" is defined as "resembling or likened to a mule in being stubborn." A mule is technically the offspring of a, er, male donkey and a female horse, so donkeys and mules are not really the same thing, but both are legendarily stubborn.

No definitive or comprehensive origin is known for the seven-note musical couplet associated with the phrase "shave and a haircut." The words "shave and a haircut," of course, align only with the first five notes of the couplet, or the section known as the "call." The two-note "response" is typically matched up with the words "six bits" (or sometimes "two bits" — it would seem that inflation is into everything these days).