Who’s stressed and frustrated?

Mass layoffs are making workers very nervous. Many are afraid of losing their jobs and are therefore working harder and longer hours to prove their worth. Survivors of layoffs have to work harder to fill the gaps left by their departed colleagues.

Then there are those who work hard and don’t receive the gratitude they feel they deserve from their bosses. They go to work everyday, work hard, and don’t feel they are rewarded properly. Raises aren’t forthcoming, and promotions aren’t either. People who seem to work less, but have more political clout, seem to do better. Sounds frustrating to me.

Being in the wrong career is also very stressful and can be frustrating. Many people are in the wrong career. They either tire of a career they once liked or they chose poorly in the first place. Others are in the right career but in the wrong job. Either way a change may be in order. It may involve a career change or simply a change in where you work. So, as you can see, there are many factors that cause people stress and frustration with their jobs. I’m sure you can name some yourself.

Practical ways to avoid Job Burnout

1. Try to establish, or re-establish, control of your job. Sometimes the worst frustration comes from feeling like everything is out of your hands. That’s not true. There is probably a lot you can do.
2. Do some soul searching. Give yourself 15 minutes each day to sort problems through calmly and deliberately. Try to identify what’s working and what’s not … what is making you happy or unhappy.
3. Set realistic goals. Draft one action plan for the next three months and another for six months after that. Try to lay out the steps that will help you achieve these goals.
4. Talk to a supervisor or other co-workers about your work and its problems. Isolation only magnifies your fears and frustrations.
5. Reward yourself when you finish a tough project with a new gadget or project. Use a vacation day.
6. Take time out for a few minutes when things seem about to overwhelm you. Take a walk, splash cold water on your face or just sit quietly.
7. Think of a way to turn a task that turns you off into one you will like and ask for your boss’s approval.
8. Give yourself space. Don’t let the job dominate your after-hours life.

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Cup your palm, move it around on a table and a cursor on the screen hovers. Tap on the table like you would click a real mouse, and the computer responds. It’s one step beyond cordless. It’s an invisible mouse.

The project, called “Mouseless,” uses an infrared laser beam and camera to track the movements of the palm and fingers and translate them into computer commands.

“Like many other projects in the past, including the Nintendo Power Glove and the Fingerworks iGesture Pad, this attempts to see how we can use new technology to control old technology,” says Daniel Wigdor, a user experience architect for Microsoft who hasn’t worked directly on the project. “It’s just an intermediate step to where we want to be.”

Though new user interfaces such as touchscreens and voice recognition systems have become popular, the two-button mouse still reigns among computer users. Many technology experts think the precision pointing that a cursor offers is extremely difficult to replicate through technologies such as touch and speech.

Last week Intel CTO Justin Rattner said though Intel research labs is working on new touchscreen ideas, the mouse and keyboard combination is unlikely to be replaced in everyday computing for a long time.

In the case of the Mouseless project, the infrared laser and camera are embedded in the computer. When a user cups their hand as if a physical mouse was present under their palm, the laser beam lights up the hand that is in contact with the table. The infrared camera detects this and interprets the movements.

A working prototype of the Mouseless system costs approximately $20 to build, says Pranav Mistry, who is leading the project.

Mistry is one of the star researchers in the area of creating new user experiences. He previously developed the “Sixth Sense” project, a wearable gestural interface that lets users wave their hands in front of them and interact with maps and other virtual objects — much like Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

The Mouseless idea is not as big a breakthrough as Sixth Sense. Though it is fun, it is difficult to see a real-world case for getting rid of hardware while keeping interaction the same. User interfaces are going beyond the point-and-click interaction that the computer mouse demands. And mouse hardware itself is cheap, so there’s not much of a cost saving here.

Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/

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Buzz is a way to share media (photos, videos), conversations and  status updates with their friends, just like on Facebook. Google plans for the  Gmail  users is to offer  an  application that brings together the information published by their contacts, forming a data stream similar to those of the Facebook and Twitter. Buzz is also coming to Google Android and Apple’s iPhone as well.

According to market research company ComScore, Google Mail has 150 million unique users, proved a good springboard for Google in the world of social networking. But this doesn’t guarantee the success. Google’s previous attempts to make their presence felt on the social networking market failed, and experts say that  will be difficult for Google to attack Facebook’s position even with the new strategy. “This must be considered a defensive move”  said Ray Valdes, analyst Gartner.

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RealTruck sells all the hot car accessories and truck accessories for Chevy, Ford, Dodge, GMC, Jeep, Mazda, Nissan, Honda, Mitsubishi, Toyota, and Isuzu as well as hundreds of other vehicles. We offer automotive and custom truck accessories for virtually anything you need to dress up, modify, enhance or upgrade your car, sport utility vehicle, cross over vehicle or truck.

From the under the hood engine performance to your car and truck exhaust system, as well as, accessories for your front bumper, grille, hood, side windows, truck bed, tailgate, seats, dash, floor and more, RealTruck has it all. We offer all the top part and accessory brands giving you a huge selection of the top pickup truck accessories and auto accessories to choose from. Whether you are looking for an access cover to enhance your truck or a set of vent visors to help you enjoy the drive, we have the largest selections from truck bed covers to billet grille inserts any everything in between.

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Having first appeared in September 1995 Inktomi was initially a pioneer of online search techniques and went on to power some of the leading web tools, notably MSN, HotBot, Looksmart and others, as well as a number of regional search engines. Dozens of other major web sites used Inktomi Enterprise Search to power their on-site search engines.

When it was launched, Inktomi claimed to have the largest web index of more than 1.3 million documents on the World Wide Web. It was created by Eric Brewer, then an assistant professor of computer science at University College of Berkeley, and graduate student Paul Gauthier. The project was initially funded by the US government’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, but it became a commercial organisation in early 1996 and soon after it gained its first major customer with the HotBot search engine.

Soon afterwards, Inktomi removed the direct interface to its search engine from the web, opting instead to operate as a provider of search for other web portals, rather than directly competing with other sites. A major coup came with the agreement to power Yahoo!’s supplementary search results, and during the years of web boom at the end of the 90′s, the Inktomi Corporation went public and rapidly increased in value.

The company grew quickly, offering a variety of web search, e-commerce and enterprise search products, but then Inktomi suffered a serious of setbacks and business realignments, so that it moved to just focus purely on search technologies. In 2000 Inktomi lost their Yahoo! contract to Google and subsequently lost further market share when AOL and Netscape Search also moved their search indexes to Inktomi’s biggest rival.

During this time Inktomi was also the first major search engine to launch a paid inclusion service, whereby websites could submit pages on a subscription basis in return for regular and frequent re-indexing. The company’s acquisition by Yahoo at the start of 2003 heralded a new dawn for this pioneering search tool and although its technology is central to Yahoo!’s search engine database, the Inktomi search engine brand has now been absorbed and it has disappeared as a standalone search engine.

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The founder of the first Internet cafe, Eva Pascoe, was working on her PhD at the time.

She got the idea to mixing sipping coffee to surfing the web while sitting at one of coffee shops near the City University of London.

Cafe Cyberia started with half a dozen HP computers, connected to the Internet through dial-up modems that were able to transfer data at 9.6 kilobits per second.

As the first Internet cafe, Cafe Cyberia got tremendous publicity, and additional investments into the business from likes of Mick Jagger and Maurice Saatchi.

With the success of Cafe Cyberia, the Internet Cafe business got into a flying start, and there were over 60 similar cafes over the world by the Summer of 1995.

Ms Pascoe sold her stake in Cafe Cyberia (to three Korean investors) in 1998 and moved to shape another field of online business, online fashion commerce.

If you feel nostalgic, you can still find the original Cafe Cyberia from London’s West End, at Whitfield St., behind Goodge St. station. However, the cafe was renamed “Be the Reds” by the new Korean owners (“Be the Reds” is a supporting cheer for the South Korean national soccer team).

Although the first Internet cafe was launched in Europe, there had been similar activity already in the U.S. even before the launch of Cafe Cyberia.

SFnet, which was launched in San Francisco in 1991 (originally as a bulletin board), was not an Internet Cafe, but rather a network of 20 coin-operated computers providing a dial-up connection to the Internet with a 2400 baud modem.

The first actual U.S. Internet cafe (according to a 1995 Wall Street Journal article) was a Chicago cyber cafe called Suba Internet Center, launched in April 1995 by Todd Bodenstein and Alex Strasheim.

Suba was located at 2945 N. Broadway in Chicago, and was sold to to Bean.Net in 2000 by the founders.

Internet Cafe History 1995 – 1999

From the tens of cybercafes by mid-1995, the industry expanded into thousands by 1997.

Internet cafes not only became a natural way for travelers to send and check email, but also a way in which local residents got access to the latest software applications.

With the continuing success of ecommerce and related fields, high-profile entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou and his company easyGroup entered Internet cafe business in 1999 with the easyInternetCafe franchise.

By 2005, easyInternetCafe had become the best known and most successful Internet cafe franchise in the world.

Internet Cafe History 2000 – Today

In the U.S., the burst of the Internet bubble by late 2000 also changed the Internet Cafe industry overnight as the sources for new venture capital money virtually disappeared.

Also, the increasing success of portable computers and WiFi Internet access, combined with the fact that more and more people were having Internet access at home, resulted in fewer customers for the Internet cafes.

However, as a dynamic industry, many new cybercafes and many of the old ones started to offer a bit more targeted services than just coffee and computers, to bring in new customers.

For example, some cybercafes started to offer services primarily for gamers (and still do).

Typically, these cafes offer the latest computer games with state of the art computers.

The success of broadband network gaming brought the concept of LAN parties to these Internet cafes, as they organise gaming tournaments over broadband LAN connections.

By late 2002, the Internet gaming cybercafes had become a huge success around the world.

For example, according to some estimates, there were over 4,000 cybercafes in Taiwan by 2002, most of them focused on providing gaming.

In South Korea, the PC Bang (the South Korean name for internet gaming cafes) industry first came into existence in the mid 1990s.

Recently, it was estimated that there were over 22,000 PC Bangs (the name of Internet gaming cafes in South Korea) in South Korea at the beginning of 2006.

In addition, during January 2006, Intel, the global PC chip manufacturer, made another milestone into the Internet cafe history by opening a 120 computer PC Bang operation at Nowon-gu, in northern Seoul, South Korea.

However, as many Internet cafes in some countries have evolved into advanced gaming or business centers, the original cybercafe idea (of providing basic Internet access) is still a major growth story in many parts of the world.

India, for example, has over 50,000 Internet cafes with over 500,000 customers each month, according to some estimates. One Indian company alone, Sify Limited, which operates the iWay Internet cafe franchises, has over 3,100 cybercafes in 149 Indian cities.

One significant historic milestone in Internet cafe history has been the introduction of the Yahoo! Mail Internet Cafe Awards, awarded in September 2004, to celebrate the 10th birthday of cybercafe industry.

Source: http://www.internet-cafe-guide.com/internet-cafe-history.html

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A lot of job seekers do not know how to prepare a resume. They think it is just a piece of paper where they

How to prepare a good resume

will put their personal information and work experience. Every time I look at some resume of an applicant I find it funny to see some work experiences being presented that are irrelevant to the job applied for. Basing on my experience as a member of the hiring committee before, I would love to see a resume with the following content.

1. Career objective. Although it is optional but a clear objective will let the employer know what job you want to end up with. This will show how much you have thought about your future career.

2. Personal Information. Full name, contact details such address, telephone number(s) and email address. For email address, create a good email address that is more professional. Most job seekers, especially the fresh graduates, have a bad email addresses. Email addresses like devil_me@yahoo.com, jackthewack@gmail.com and the likes are not good to the eyes of the employers. The safest thing to do is create accounts using your name.

3. Work Experience. Start with your most recent work history and work backwards chronologically, listing the name of the employer, your job title, the dates you worked there, and your responsibilities, tasks and achievements. List all work experiences that you think is relevant to the job you are applying for.

4. Skills. Enumerate your skills. I would suggest you put a simple grading system like highest – lowest (1-5) and rate your skills accordingly. Remember to enumerate the skills that are relevant to the job you are applying for.

5. Academic Record. This is very important for fresh graduates. Since they do not have enough work experience to showcase it is very important to include their academic achievements in the resume.

6. Character Reference. Personally I do not like to see a resume with “upon request” under character reference. This is an important section of the resume because employers want to know what others are saying about you.

7. Grammar and Spelling. Observe your grammar and spelling very carefully. If you need somebody to check your resume, it would be much better.

8. Presentation. A clean and good choice of font size and type is a very important. Employers looking at your resume will find you uninteresting if you don’t know how to present your resume. Unless you are applying for a graphics designer you may put some art into your resume. Always remember simplicity is an art.

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“If all I do is hear, I will forget
If I hear and see, I will remember
If I hear, see and do, I will understand”

On-the-Job-Training or OJT is job training that occurs in the work place. It has many advantages, but it can also have a few disadvantages if the OJT is not planned and executed properly. It is part of a college curriculum that aims to train and orient students about the work and their future career. It is very important not only to teach students their chosen career but to show students the reality about working.

Most students nowadays are not serious in their training. They don’t plan ahead and pick the best company that they can choose. Worst, they ended up cleaning the desk of their superior or doing unrelated tasks.

Here is why students should not take OJT for granted:

1. If you will get a high evaluation grade, your employer might hire you when you graduate.
2. Your background OJT is very important when applying for a job. Oftentimes, employers will ask you the relevance of your training to your course and to the position you are applying for.
3. Some companies will give you a monthly allowance if you are doing well in your tasks.
4. OJT will be your training ground. If you still have no idea on what is meant to be a worker, OJT will give a hint of career realities.
5. Your OJT superior my recommend your skills to other companies whom he knows.
6. It will give you a sense of confidence that you can use when applying for a job after graduation
7. Help individuals make informed career choices

Students should realize the importance of OJT on their future career. Having a good performance during OJT is very important especially now that there’s a tight competition towards job seekers and the high qualification of companies.

For articles about career move, visit DitoNa Articles

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1. Be professional. When you approach your boss, do not give threats and avoid ultimatums. You have to be courteous as much as possible. But do not beg either.

2. Consider your market value. A good way of preparing yourself for the negotiation is to research on what is your fair market value in terms of your skills and position. It is better for you to know if you are way behind what other people are receiving in some other companies within your locality.

3. Negotiate well. In this planet, everything is negotiable. So if you think it is fair for you to get a raise, go on and ask.

4. Highlight your accomplishments. Do you think you have provided a lot of achievements for the company? All companies always value their employees especially those who have excel in their post. During the meeting, you can explain your value in detail.

Asking for a raise is never been too easy. But the fact remains. If you think you need a raise, go get it.

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Good thing I found Windows Mail.

Windows Mail is an e-mail and newsgroup client included in Windows Vista that was superseded by Windows Live Mail. It is the successor to Outlook Express. Microsoft previewed Windows Mail on Channel 9 on October 10, 2005.

Unlike Outlook Express, Windows Mail is not considered to be a component of Internet Explorer. As such, it will not be made available for earlier Windows operating systems, while Windows Internet Explorer 7 was made available for Windows XP. – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mail

I would like to share why I like Windows Mail:

Reading emails in one window

If you have a lot of email accounts and you want to monitor all emails coming from different accounts in one window, this application is for you. It is very easy to organize your emails by using folders and you can reply emails without logging into your web-based email account one by one.

If you want to read in offline mode

Have you experienced trying to get the cell phone number of your client in your email but found out that there is no internet connection and you can not open your email? One of the best things you can get from using this application is that you can read your emails again even if you do not have an internet connection. All your emails will be saved in your computer so you can re-open it anytime you want.

Organize your email and files

Another good reason why I like to use this application is because all the attachments are there together with the email. I do not have to download it and save it in a folder. The hassle of downloading it from your web-based email and saving it in your hard drive is that you will lose track of the file because the email that comes with it is separated from the file. With Windows Mail, you have the file and you have the email in one place.

Back up emails

Whether you will consider your emails in Windows Mail as your back up or the one in your web-based mail, it doesn’t matter. Bottom line is that you have a back up of your emails.

Contacts in one place

There are times you want to get a contact from one account and use it in your other account. You won’t be bothered anymore by shifting from one account to the other because everything is in one place.

There are a few other benefits in using Windows Mail for you to find out. Each of us has different preferences but I bet you will like this application.

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