Shayan Gaziani

4 Ways to Manage Stress Using Technology

If you’re looking to relieve your life of unnecessary stress, try one of these tech-savvy methods to lighten your burden and make you feel ready to take on the world.

1. Calming Reflection

Meditation has proven itself as a common yet efficient way of managing stress, and with apps like Mindfulness and Calm, short meditation sessions are at your fingertips wherever and whenever you need them. The Breathe2Relax app provides you with breathing techniques to help you quickly simmer down in any situation.

2. Soothing Sounds

While white noise machines do exist, you can quickly find hours’ worth of relaxing sounds on sites such as YouTube or Spotify, where there are multiple playlists to choose from, or by using the handy Relax Melodies app.

3. Gadgets and Gizmos

A Dublin startup called Galvanic created Pip, a biosensor which measures electrodermal activity associated with stress levels by having the user place their thumb on a small device. After calculating your levels, Pip can suggest techniques to reduce stress, and warn you if your stress levels are too high.

4. Quality Sleep

A great device to use for a re-energizing catnap is the Phillips Wake-Up Light. Described as an uplifting alarm clock, this accessory simulates a sunrise and accompanying sounds to help eliminate grogginess. According to a review by Health.com, even after just four hours of sleep, the experimenter woke up feeling refreshed, thanks to the new clock. An app with a similar purpose is SleepBot. Previously featured on our blog, this alarm clock app measures your movement while sleeping to determine the best time to wake you and leave you feeling refreshed.

The Stress-Free Way of Finding a Job

Graduation season is approaching, and for many graduates, while their academic career closes, their professional career is slowly opening its doors. That in itself is extremely stressful – but it doesn’t have to be.

Introducing: LinkedIn.

If you haven’t yet heard of this precious gift, LinkedIn is a professional social-networking
site for creating connections (or “links”) between working professionals, including prospective employees with their desired employers, for example. These connections can occur at numerous levels. While we’ll explore its options in a bit, in layman’s term, it’s a Facebook for professionals, with over 187 million unique visitors per month.

To best describe how LinkedIn works, let’s use this scenario:

You log into LinkedIn and created a profile. This profile is extremely intricate, asking for information regarding education, volunteerism, employment history, honors/awards, projects, skills, interests, etc. You can also upload professional works, such as research papers, artwork, etc.

Once you fill this in (it can take a while), you would then upload a profile photo and launch their customized page, available for other LinkedIn users to see, include friends and prospective employers. However, LinkedIn offers many customization settings, one of them being security, so that you would be able to control how his/her profile is viewed.

Your new profile page essentially serves as a modern, online resume. Deviating from the traditional paper-style resumes, LinkedIn offers you the ability to use this page as a showcase of your abilities and achievements. In fact, many employers will search LinkedIn for candidates, making their profiles the first thing that employers see. As you grow and gain more experience, you’ll start creating “connections,” that is, “friending” working professionals you know on the website. In essence, they serve as your virtual network, being able to endorse you for skills you may have specified, or refer your profile for employment.

How to get started

LinkedIn is such a thorough service that no blog post can truly, comprehensively cover its values and services. Instead, click over to www.linkedin.com and peruse the site, search for profiles, and see if LinkedIn can help you grow in an online, professional setting.

More resources

Thankfully, many online and in-person resources are available for your utilization to make you an efficient LinkedIn user:

The first is a set of eight only tutorials to get started with LinkedIn, available here.

The second, if you are an SMU student, is to visit the Hegi Family Career Development
Center during their drop-in hours. There, experts can guide you to creating and maintaining an exemplary profile, as well as offer other quintessential services for starting your professional career.

And lastly, visit with someone who has a profile already, including, perhaps, your professor! See how they use LinkedIn and what the service has offered them.

Try out LinkedIn today – it may just land you your next job.

P.S. For some fast facts about LinkedIn, click here.

Adios Internet Explorer

By: Shayan Gaziani

In August of 1995 Microsoft released their first version of Internet Explorer (IE). A revolutionary feat at the time, eleven generations later IE has fallen behind rivals (such as Google Chrome, Safari, and Firefox) in terms of speed, ingenuity, and modernism.

A solemn farewell.

Twenty years later, Microsoft is pulling the plug. As noted by The Verge, the company revealed IE’s fate this past January. While the browser will still exist, function, and be available for download, maintenance will soon cease. Earlier this month at Microsoft Convergence, the company’s marketing chief Chris Capossela revealed plans for the future.

“We’re right now researching what the new brand, or the new name, for our browser should be in Windows 10,” said Capossela. “We’ll continue to have Internet Explorer, but we’ll also have a new browser called Project Spartan, which is codenamed Project Spartan. We have to name the thing.”

Moving on.

Project Spartan is set to be officially released along with Windows 10 later this year. According to a blog post by the IE team, “Spartan provides a more interoperable, reliable, and discoverable experience with advanced features including the ability to annotate on web pages, a distraction-free reading experience, and integration of Cortana for finding and doing things online faster.”

Information for this post was provided by The Verge here and here.

Save Your Voice for the Presentation

By: Shayan Gaziani

Imagine this Scenario:

You walk into class prepared to deliver a paramount presentation. You’ve spent hours rehearsing every aspect from timing to delivery. You’ve spent days, if not weeks, preparing the file, compiling countless amounts of slides, graphics, links, and embedded objects.

Approaching the classroom computer, you plug in your thumb drive and open the presentation file. You steady yourself, take a gulp of air, start the presenter view and – notice that every single piece of image, audio, and video is gone. Blank. Nada.

Arguably one of the most venerated of presentation software, Microsoft’s PowerPoint provides a robust, feature-rich, and professional aid to presenters across a variety of disciplines and environments. From the boardroom to the classroom, PowerPoint has proven its usefulness and importance as a de facto method to revolutionizing the way we deliver speeches, presentations, assignments, etc.

But what if it doesn’t Work?

One common, yet egregious, issue with PowerPoint, especially in versions pre-dating 2013, is media and custom fonts not displaying correctly when a presentation file is transferred to another computer. The seemingly logical approach is to download images, sounds, and videos to your computer and simply insert them into a presentation. When you save and transfer the file, everything should clone and transfer as is, right?

Not exactly.

PowerPoint is big on trying to keep file sizes small and compressed, and one of the ways it does that is by linking media objects in a presentation. Remember that video you inserted into PowerPoint? It’s not really in the presentation file – rather a link to it is that PowerPoint then pulls when presenting.

Fortunately, there is an easy fix to this. Most PowerPoint versions include an option called Package for CD (On Mac, the issue can be circumvented by simply saving as a PowerPoint Show [.ppsx] format – you won’t get the viewer mentioned below, though). The feature allows the creator to compile all of the resources that PowerPoint has used to create the presentation (including your media), and create a packaged folder, including a mobile version of PowerPoint, called PowerPoint viewer, to ensure your presentation can run on a computer that does not have PowerPoint Installed. The Package for CD option allows you to create a presentation CD, or simply save the packaged files on a drive.

The Fix.

The steps to accomplish this are fairly simple, as provided by Microsoft. Go ahead and give it a try – it may just save your grade.