IT Insights Blog

It may be true that good things come in threes. Bad things, on the other hand, often don't limit themselves to an arbitrary numeric procession. They just keep coming. Hurricane Harvey just hammered the Gulf Coast of Texas for several days, causing catastrophic flooding in the city of Houston and surrounding areas. Meanwhile, far out to sea in the Atlantic Ocean, Hurricane Irma has now swirled up into a Category 3 monster with 115 mph winds.

Everyone likes to save money. If you lined up 100 people and told them they could have a delicious cheeseburger for $20 right now, or get the same cheeseburger, just as freshly made and delicious, for $5 by waiting until the next day, well, some of them would probably cough up $20. Because when you gotta eat, you gotta eat. It seems reasonable to predict, on the other hand, that at least 92 or 93 of those folks would wait a day and save the dough.

Early Monday morning, the guided-missile destroyer, USS John S. McCain, collided with an oil tanker off the coast of Singapore. Initial reports indicate a “steering failure.” The fourth such accident involving a 7th Fleet warship this year, the collision occurred at the entrance to the Strait of Malacca — an extremely crowded 1.7-mile-wide waterway that connects the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Approximately 25 percent of global shipping transits the Strait annually.

IT needs women. For one thing, IT simply needs more people. Whatever your feelings are about the root cause of the so-called "skills gap" in IT, there's no arguing that IT jobs go unfilled every day because it's hard to find people to fill them. And when you think about how often the female population in a given IT sphere amounts to less than a tenth of the male population, well, it's clear that there's at least one obvious place too look for more IT professionals.

Earlier today, the eyes and hearts of millions around the world were captivated by a strange and wondrous phenomenon. Some might call it a natural phenomenon. Others would likely describe it as bearing the weight of both terrestrial mystery and celestial purpose. Wherever you land, there's no doubt that the star in the firmament shining most brightly this morning was singer, oft-spurned lover/philosopher, and Voice of a Generation Taylor Swift. (Gotcha!)