Tech support

Technical support (tech support) refers to a range services companies provide to their customers for products such as software, mobile phones, printers, and other electronic, mechanical or electromechanical products. Technical support services usually provide users with help in solving some common problems rather than providing training on how to use the product.

Technical support is usually delivered over telephone, via email, over chat (IM) or using special software or software extensions that the user can employ to directly contact tech support. Technical support representatives are very familiar with the ins and outs of the products for which they provide support. If there is a problem that cannot be solved by the tech support, it is escalated to the development team and logged as a bug that should be fixed by a future product update or the next product iteration.

There are a few key types of technical support:

Time and Material: This type of support is common in the tech industry. Also known as "break-fix" IT support, the payment of the materials and technician service charge falls upon the customer for a pre-negotiated rate.

Managed Services: This is usually given to large-scale customers rather than individual consumers. A list of well-defined services and performance indicators are provided to the customer on an ongoing basis for a fixed rate, which is agreed upon on contract. Services provided could be 24/7 monitoring of servers, 24/7 help desk and the like. This may include on-site visits when problems cannot be solved remotely.

Block Hours: This is a prepaid support system where the customer pays for a certain amount of time, which can be used per month or per year. This allows customers to use the hours flexibly without the hassle of paper work or multiple bills.

Internet stars

Someone who is known (either world-widely or nationally) through the internet, though mainly from Youtube. Many get hated especially if they breakthrough and be part of Hollywood business (Justin Bieber, Rebecca Black), but a lot are admired.

Most internet celebrities are comedians, singers, bloggers and, nowadays, pranksters. The singers part is where some haters grow, but the comedians get a lot of praise.

They usually start out good and funny, but after a few videos, they start to do anything they want and lose ideas/creativity. But people still like them. I admit, I'm one.
Janoskians, Chris Crocker (one of the first, most influential), Shane Dawson, Smosh, Nigahiga, MrTeddy, Kevjumba, Ray William Johnson, Perez Hilton, Jenna Marbles, Community Channel (Natalie Tran)...are examples of an internet celebrity.

An Internet celebrity (also known as a social media influencer) is a celebrity who has acquired or developed their fame and notability through the Internet. The rise of social media has helped people increase their outreach to a global audience.

 Internet celebrities may be recruited by companies for influencer marketing to advertise products to their fans and followers on their platforms. Internet celebrities often function as lifestyle gurus who promote a particular lifestyle or attitude.

In this role, they may be crucial influencers or multipliers for trends in genres including fashion, technology, video games, politics, and entertainment.

GIF's and memes

A GIF, or Graphical Interchange Format, is a bitmap image format that was invented on June 15 1987 by a US software writer called Steve Wilhite for CompuServe.

Gifs are highly compressed images that typically allow up to 8 bits per pixel for each image, which in total allow up to 256 colours across the image.

For comparison, a JPEG image can display up to 16 million colours and pretty much reaches the limits of the human eye.

Back when the internet was new, gifs were used extensively because they didn’t require much bandwidth.

A single gif file can feature multiple frames which are displayed in succession in order to create an animated clip, these can either be looped endlessly or just stop at the end of the sequence.

We tend to use animated gifs today as “Reaction Gifs”, they act as fun replies for conversations on apps like Facebook Messenger.

The main difference between an animated gif and a meme is that memes tend to be static images that make a topical or pop culture reference and animated gifs are, more simply, moving images.

You can find all the animated gif memes that your heart desires at website such as Giphy and Awesome Gifs.

As with most things, gifs and memes work better together. Grab an animated gif and stick some topical words on it et voilà, you have an animated meme.

History

In the past history has been justified for reasons we would no longer accept. For instance, one of the reasons history holds its place in current education is because earlier leaders believed that a knowledge of certain historical facts helped distinguish the educated from the uneducated; the person who could reel off the date of the Norman conquest of England (1066) or the name of the person who came up with the theory of evolution at about the same time that Darwin did (Wallace) was deemed superior—a better candidate for law school or even a business promotion. Knowledge of historical facts has been used as a screening device in many societies, from China to the United States, and the habit is still with us to some extent. Unfortunately, this use can encourage mindless memorization—a real but not very appealing aspect of the discipline.

History should be studied because it is essential to individuals and to society, and because it harbors beauty. There are many ways to discuss the real functions of the subject—as there are many different historical talents and many different paths to historical meaning. All definitions of history's utility, however, rely on two fundamental facts.

History Helps Us Understand People and Societies

In the first place, history offers a storehouse of information about how people and societies behave. Understanding the operations of people and societies is difficult, though a number of disciplines make the attempt.

An exclusive reliance on current data would needlessly handicap our efforts. How can we evaluate war if the nation is at peace—unless we use historical materials? How can we understand genius, the influence of technological innovation, or the role that beliefs play in shaping family life, if we don't use what we know about experiences in the past? Some social scientists attempt to formulate laws or theories about human behavior. But even these recourses depend on historical information, except for in limited, often artificial cases in which experiments can be devised to determine how people act.

Major aspects of a society's operation, like mass elections, missionary activities, or military alliances, cannot be set up as precise experiments. Consequently, history must serve, however imperfectly, as our laboratory, and data from the past must serve as our most vital evidence in the unavoidable quest to figure out why our complex species behaves as it does in societal settings. This, fundamentally, is why we cannot stay away from history: it offers the only extensive evidential base for the contemplation and analysis of how societies function, and people need to have some sense of how societies function simply to run their own lives.

Productive tips

Don’t overwhelm yourself. To-do lists often fail because we make them way too complex or the tasks are unequal. Some tasks will take a long time, others won’t take any time at all. This creates an unbalance in the way we distribute our time. What happens then is that our to-do list then becomes a procrastination tool. Yes, that’s right. Because then we do the easy stuff, and then become really distracted on the hard stuff.

Before you read one more article on how to be more productive, remember this:  Be kind to yourself and your mistakes.

You can’t expect to be more productive overnight.

You’ve probably spent years cultivating your work habits–both good and bad, consciously or subconsciously–and those won’t immediately change.

Small adjustments can lead to more lasting changes, but those may take time and discipline. It looks really easy when you’re reading a productivity article like this to think it’s easy. But it’s not. I’m not writing this from an expert point of view, but from a fellow worker in the fight against distraction.

So be patient and kind through the rough patches and try again. Okay, now we’re ready:

How To Be More Productive
1. Make a reasonable to-do list.
Don’t overwhelm yourself. To-do lists often fail because we make them way too complex or the tasks are unequal. Some tasks will take a long time, others won’t take any time at all. This creates an unbalance in the way we distribute our time. What happens then is that our to-do list then becomes a procrastination tool. Yes, that’s right. Because then we do the easy stuff, and then become really distracted on the hard stuff.

Don’t lie, you’ve done that before. So then you need to …

Your Daily To-Do List is Failing. Here Are 3 Strategies To Make It Better & Improve Productivity.

2. Set small goals for the tasks.
With every new project or assignment, the scope may seem too large. But once you start breaking it down and realizing what can be accomplished, you’ll notice how each part builds upon the other.

One of the easiest and most practical things you can do is to break down your marketing project or deliverable into smaller goals. What are the pieces and assets needed? Who do you need to talk to first? Break up these pieces before even setting timelines, and then estimate how long they’ll take you to accomplish. Understanding the scope of what’s being asked, putting the steps in place and then estimating the time needed will help you get a grasp of what’s being asked. Sometimes what seems like a big project won’t take much time at all, or vice versa.

Tracking your time, even if no one is asking you for it can help you understand your work habits and the time of day when you finish work most successfully. Tracking your time efficiently, knowing what your tech habits are, from when you check your email to how often you check your favorite websites or social media can affect your workday in a big way.

By re-arranging some of those things, you may be able to get more done. Tracking your time for a week or two will help you see where you spend your time, and will help you better estimate your goals from #1 a little bit better the next time around. The next time you’re asked to repeat a task, you’ll have a better sense of the amount of time needed.

You’ll also notice problem areas, where you tend to be less productive, or identify certain scheduling quirks that you can work around–such as weekly meetings or appointments or even when that one coworker comes by to chat for a few minutes.

Contests

A contest may require entrants to submit a photo, answer questions, respond to short writing prompts or complete any other action or task that can be judged on performance.

A contest is essentially a game of skill, and alongside sweepstakes they are the ideal type of promotions for businesses and brands to run.

The key difference between contests and sweepstakes, which are often referred to as giveaways, is that a contest is a skill-based promotion where winners are chosen on merit, while a sweepstakes or giveaway is a luck-based promotion where winners are chosen at random.

Prize promotions in the US and most other countries are regulated by no purchase necessary laws that essentially state that if promotion winners are randomly drawn you cannot ask users to make a purchase or provide other forms of consideration in order to enter your promotion.

Since contest winners are drawn based on merit instead of randomly, no purchase necessary laws are not applicable to contests and you are free to require the purchase of your product for entry. This includes getting users submit photos of themselves with your product, or write testimonials about their experience with it.

Troubleshooting guides

Troubleshooting is a systematic approach to problem solving that is often used to find and correct issues with complex machines, electronics, computers and software systems.

The first step in troubleshooting is gathering information on the issue, such as an undesired behavior or a lack of expected functionality. Other important information includes related symptoms and special circumstances that may be required to reproduce the issue.

Once the issue and how to reproduce it are understood, the next step might be to eliminate unnecessary components in the system and verify that the issue persists, to rule out incompatibility and third-party causes.

Continuing, assuming the issue remains, one might next check common causes. Depending on the particular issue and the troubleshooter’s experience, they may have some ideas. They may also check product documentation and/or conduct research on a support database or through a search engine.

After common causes are ruled out, the troubleshooter may resort to the more systematic and logical process of verifying the expected function of parts of a system. One common method is the split-half troubleshooting approach: With a problem resulting from a number of possible parts in series, one tests half-way down the line of components. If the middle component works, one goes to the middle of the remaining parts, approaching the end. If the test finds a problem at the mid-point, one does a split towards the start of the line until the problem part is found. The split-half process can save time in systems that depend on many components.

Once the problem part is identified, it may be adjusted, repaired or replaced as needed. Evidence of effective troubleshooting is indicated when the issue is no longer reproducible and function is restored one. 

The success of troubleshooting often depends on the thoroughness and experience of the troubleshooter. That said, the majority of those who develop tech savvy are likely to have friends, coworkers and family who call on them for help.