IT Insights Blog

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.

Once upon about five tons of hair gel and many, many dope threads ago, a vocal quintet from Boston (more specifically from Dorchester) burst onto the late-1980s music scene with the release of smooth ditty called "Please Don't Go Girl." Thus was the origin of New Edition. Or was it N Sync? Or maybe that's how Backstreet Boys came to be. Or it perhaps could have been 98 Degrees. The point is not what they called themselves, but that they were part of a teen boy band new wave.

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.

The Transcona Grain Elevator, built at Transcona in Canada's Manitoba province, is notorious in civil engineering circles for its near collapse in 1913. The structure's bin house — the part that includes the bins, or vertical cylinders (65 of them in this particular instance), where grain is stored — famously tilted 27 degrees to the west in a single day. This occurred shortly after the structure's initial opening, when it was filled with 875,000 bushels of grain.

There are things in life that all of us take largely, if not entirely, for granted. When is the last time, for example, that you spared a deep thought for the truly amazing phenomenon of enjoying a few hearty swallows of cold water straight from the tap or drinking fountain? Lots of people sleep comfortably in a bed every night, but how often do most of us take any action that recognizes what an incredible privilege it is to be cozy and secure in our repose?