My Opinions Are Important

I’ve just found a very interesting website that sells tactical police gear.

What type of tactical police gear, you ask? For starters, bullet-proof vests, knives, industrial-strength torches and flashlights, backpacks, sunglasses, clothing of various descriptions, gun holsters and much, much more.

All the gear on the site is designed for professional use. Military personnel and cops are among the customers, so if you’ve always wanted to be part of a SWAT team this is the place to start.

The LA Police Gear site includes action photos, sent in by customers. If that page is to be believed, LA Police Gear products are very popular in the Iraqi police force.

So begins one of my favourite songs from my formative years - “Dead Eyes Opened (1993 Remix)” by Severed Heads. (Dig that band name!)

In 1993 I was a teenager and very much into grunge music. Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins and Soundgarden were my favourite bands. I didn’t bother with any other genres, particularly not techno music. Dead Eyes Opened was one of the few exceptions to this.

The track could loosely be called dance music; I suppose nowadays it would be called house music. Perhaps Horror House, if there is such a thing. It’s a fairly eerie piece of music that builds up into a climax about midway through the song. Quite well done if you ask me.

I remember playing it to my dad; he didn’t like it.

The clip for the song didn’t get any airplay at that time due to strobing and sexual content (amusing, given that it’s about 10% as sexy as any RnB or rap clip, but I guess ratings systems have always been a tad arbitrary).

Dead Eyes Opened is hard to find anywhere nowadays, legally or otherwise; but I did find the video clip on YouTube. Hurrah for YouTube!

One of the most perplexing questions about opening or running a small business is where to get finance.

The most obvious option is, perhaps, a bank. But most banks are notoriously conservative when it comes to providing finance for small businesses. They would rather deal with big businesses. After all, big businesses tend to be much less of a risk.

Fortunately, there are finance providers available to bridge the gap between capital and small business. Restaurant Business Loans are one establishment who specialise in providing finance to, you guessed it, restaurants.

I support finance businesses of this nature. After all, it is small business that keeps our economy ticking over and our workers employed. When small businesses prosper, we all do.

I’ve never worked at McDonald’s, or been a waiter, but I’ve done many strange jobs while being out of my chosen industry of Information Technology.

How it happened was this: after retrenched from my programming role in 2001, I struggled to find other IT work in 2001 and couldn’t find it in 2002 either. After a period of several months of unemployment I realised I had better seek work in other fields!

I spell out what happened in more detail in my post What I Learned From Unemployment. Basically, I held two door to door sales jobs, spent 18 months doing courier work, tried my hand at high school teaching and even spent time filling cigarette vending machines.

After being fired from a job making announcements on railway stations due to this blog(!), I finally wound up back in an IT role waaaay back in 2007. That was a nice turnaround, but this series is called What I Learned From so let’s get onto that, shall we?

In describing this, it is hard to put tangible points on what I learned, but basically, I believe my life today is much richer for that period of struggle, than if I had remained in my IT role of 2001 and built a solid career in that industry, as was my intention.

Sure, I like being in IT, but how would I even have known how much, without the points of comparison I have had along the way? My colleagues who I left behind in 2001 always seemed discontented, perhaps from being in the one place too long, whereas during the same time period I worked outdoor as well as indoor jobs, working with many different interesting people, and got the chance to start a new business. I now have a much better idea of what I’m good at, what I can cope with, and what is truly important in life.

Although I haven’t made a fortune, I have many “life skills” that I believe will serve me well in years to come.

(This is part of the What I Learned From group writing project at Middle Zone Musings.)

I haven’t blogged about this before, but I have now been going out with my girlfriend, Marjorie, for about six months.

As she is my first real girlfriend (there had been a few half-chances earlier), I have found the relationship a real adventure, and there has also been much to learn.

To that end, I have been spending much time reading relationship books, both with her and on my own. I have learned much from doing this, and can heartily recommend it to any couple. It has opened my eyes to many issues and how these impact on a relationship. Chances are, your significant other has a different family background, and different viewpoints on subjects as diverse as money, sex, religion and gender roles. All these things need to be discussed.

There are many useful web resources also.

But books can only take you so far, and unfortunately some of them contain bad advice, sad to say. It is highly advantageous to at some point consider some form of Christian Counseling, done by qualified professionals who have experience in the field, who can analyze and apply solid relationship truths to what is happening in your relationship.

I think it’s important to take relationships seriously. For that reason, I intend to do some form of pre-marital counselling once that becomes appropriate.

Imagine you are on a TV game show, asked to choose between three doors, behind which are three prizes. One of the three doors reveals a new car! The other doors, if opened, reveal goats. There is no way for you to know which is which, so you pick one at random. Without revealing what is behind the door you chose, the host (who knows which door wins the car) then opens one of the remaining doors to reveal a goat. After this, he asks if you’d like to switch your chosen door for the only other door remaining.

If you choose to switch, what are the odds that you win the car?

A one in two chance?

Nope - a two in three chance.

(If you didn’t quite follow that, the Wikipedia link above explains it much better than I did. It probably helps if you’ve actually watched that game show, too.)

Yes, that is correct - I’ve signed up for the blog marketing program PayPerPost. You have probably noticed many other blogs sign up for this as well.

So why are you signing up?

For the money, of course! To put it simply, I have less time than I once did to blog, and unless I’m getting some kind of return it’s hard to justify the time.

So what will happen now? Shall this blog become nothing but advertisements?

No! For starters, that is against PayPerPost’s rules, that effectively mean that at least 50% of a blog’s posts must be non-paid in order to remain in their program. (Although I intend to have significantly less than 50% of this blog’s posts as paid posts.)

But additionally, I actually like blogging. And I would much prefer to keep blog posts as high quality as I can manage. I want to keep this blog worth reading. To that end, I’ll keep posting lots of non-paid posts of the type that’s characterised this blog until now. Additionally, I want the paid posts to be as entertaining as possible.

PayPerPost seems to be the largest program of its kind on the Web. There are a large number of paid post opportunities available for bloggers. But I’ve only just started; we’ll see how things go.

Some students with too much spare time have immersed a computer into a tank full of mineral water:

As you can see, the computer is apparently fully operational.

You may be asking yourself: is this not completely pointless? On the contrary: if some of the more alarming Global Warming projections turn out to be correct, those of us who live near coastlines shall need to know how to keep computers working underwater. Not to mention fridges, cars, TVs etc.

Perhaps next these students can work on gill transplants.

Over 300,000 Greeks starved to death during World War II.

I had no idea.

I also read in today’s Herald Sun that the Nazis shot many Greeks for helping Australian soldiers (by giving them food, for example) during World War II.

This has lowered my view of the Nazis, were that possible.

It says something about the scale of carnage that occurred during World War II, that I hadn’t heard anything about the starvation of 300,000 people in one nation despite reading a number of books about that war (not to mention TV documentaries and other sources). Makes me wonder what else I haven’t heard about.

Located on the South Gippsland Highway, on the way to Phillip Island, this rural cafe does a mean devonshire tea. The scones were first rate, and the jam (blueberry on that day) and cream were both top-notch. Coffee was quite reasonable, with a nice creamy texture.

The view from our table: