IT Insights Blog

It’s summer time! Or as most of us think of it, VACATION TIME! That blessed time away from the daily grind of e-mails, ringing phones and demanding deadlines. Vacations are a time to decompress and recharge our work batteries. According to a 2016 report from Project Time Off, an organization whose admirable aim is to transform American attitudes and behavior toward taking time off from work, U.S. workers took an average of 16.2 days of vacation in 2015.

Today, the TestOut Continuing Education team is preparing to saddle up and ride the high country. Well, sort of. It's the annual TestOut company bike ride, so the saddles are of the bicycle seat variety — and believe us, they will cause "saddle" sores for the TestOut-ers who only do this sort of thing a couple of times per year — and, well, it's all the high country here in Utah, even if you're just riding the paved trail on the banks of the Provo River.

You can't get money for nothing — unless you're the guys who sing that one song from the '80s or '90s or whenever it was — and money usually gets you more than, well, nothing. It's always a good idea, however, to try to get the most that your money can purchase. And, as we all know, the price of most things that you can buy with money is more of a suggestion (ever heard the acronym MSRP, or "manufacturer's suggested retail price"?) than a hard-and-fast rule.

In 1991 Noel Vallejo started TestOut Corporation (not its name at the time) to help computer training companies better market and sell IT certification training programs. As demand for these programs grew, one significant hurdle to get over was that many busy professionals lacked the time and means to attend expensive training seminars.

Goblin Valley State Park at the edge of the San Rafael Swell in central Utah has a spooky, otherworldly atmosphere. The extraterrestrial vibe is so strong, in fact, that the makers of the Star Trek-spoofing comedy movie Galaxy Quest went to Goblin Valley to film the scene where Tim Allen's blithely inexperienced "crew" visits a strange planet to locate and recover a "beryllium sphere" to fuel the Thermian exploration vessel where they have become honored guests.