IT Insights Blog

Sometime this weekend — just before midnight on Saturday, to be precise, quite literally at the eleventh hour — the next potentially winning combination in the Powerball lottery will be announced. The current jackpot stands at roughly $435 million, with a "cash value" (whatever that means) of $273.1 million. Maybe that's the after-tax payout? Maybe it doesn't really matter to the winner? What's a quarter of a billion dollars between sweaty-palmed suckers hoping to turn a multi-tens-of-dollars investment into a multimillion-dollar American Dream?

First there was Amazon. Now everyone is doing it. Amazon Echo, the home assistant "smart speaker" that offers you a voice-activated connection to the web, as well as to various internet-enabled devices in your home, lit a tiny consumer fire at the end of 2014 as a special offering to Amazon Prime members. (The cheery program that responds to Echo commands is named Alexa.) Then the gizmo caught on, fueled by a general release in 2015, and Amazon's first-ever Super Bowl ad (featuring Alec Baldwin) in 2016.

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to visit with a teenager named Paul. Paul just finished his junior year and has landed a summer job with a local tire repair shop. As a reader, he is familiar with many of western civilization’s great books, and would be considered well-read even for one twice his age. His communication skills are top-notch, and he has a GPA well above his peers. He also possesses another valuable non-teenager like trait — he knows how to save money.

This past weekend I went to see the latest installment of the Pirates of the Caribbean film franchise. I have mixed feelings about the movie. I spent the two hours and nine minutes of show time wading through a myriad of tangled storylines and interweaving plot threads, masked by lots and lots of action.

The IT Insights blog is taking the day off, in honor of the U.S. observance of Memorial Day. We will be back on Wednesday, May 31. Until then ...