IT Insights Blog

Hackers have a pretty tarnished reputation and, if you think about it, that's probably always been the case. Has "hacking" anything really ever been looked on as being productive, positive, or beneficial? Prior to the information age, "hacking" was probably most often something done with machetes and, before that, swords. And unless you were say, hacking your way through dense jungle foliage, there's a pretty good change that what was getting hacked was human limbs.

Back in the 1880s and 1890s, the era, in the United States, of the first transcontinental railroads, poor workers used to follow rail lines from place to place in search of a job, a handout, or something better than whatever they'd left behind. A culture gradually grew up around these disadvantaged wanderers that persists to this day. Something about so-called "hobos" fires the imagination, and almost everyone is at least passingly familiar with bits and pieces of hobo lore.

As the old saying goes, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. And nobody likes a dull boy. Maybe more to the point, a dull boy — or girl — probably doesn't get nearly as much work done as someone who's a little bit fresher and livelier. If you can figure out ways for your work team to get regular breaks from whatever their routine is, then those same employees are likely to be more invested and energetic when it's "back to the grind" time.

Humans have been aware of seasonal fluctuation in the number of sunshiny hours per day for thousands of years. The loved-by-some, hated-by-others timekeeping scheme that we now call daylight saving time (DST), however, is a relatively recent innovation. A New Zealand entomologist named George Hudson first proposed the modern DST regimen in 1895, and it gradually caught on with nations around the world (including the United States, in 1918) over the next few decades.

Spring is just around the corner, and that means that baseball players are, um, already shagging fly balls and taking BP. Hey, you think spring training can wait until, you know, spring is actually here? Not a chance. The Arizona-based Cactus League tossed out the first pitch on Feb. 21, while the Grapefruit League kicked off in Florida on Feb. 22. It's hardly reasonable to expect baseball players to be ready to play 180 games if they don't get started early.