The importance of clean underwear.

Over a month ago now my wife and I were involved in a car accident. We are both thankfully fine and have since moved on, but at the time it felt pretty horrific. My in-laws took us to the Joondalup emergency ward after we had moved my poor little car off the main road; I had insisted we go due to my wife's pregnancy, and my wife insisted because of some little thing about me not being able to move my neck.

One of the key memories I have of this experience is lying on a hospital bed with a neck-brace on and sandbags around my head, my beautiful wife standing on one side and a cute nurse on the other, both of them pulling at my jeans and telling me to stop fidgeting. And despite the frustration of having to lie still and not being able to move, and the concern for what my x-rays were going to come back with, at that time the only thought I had was; "Gosh, it's a good thing I put good undies on this morning".

The important things in life, huh?

Cents sense.

I get annoyed pretty quickly when it comes to other people's business, mainly because it's my job.

I get to see quite a few business people in their work environments with my job, ranging from the struggling to the highly successful. They all undoubtedly work hard at their business, and many of them have piles - if not shelves - of business and management literature.

And I always seem to see the same mistakes.

I don't know what these books and DVDs are saying to my clients, but there must be something fundamentally missing in the self-help sections that we consistently see similar mistakes over and over and over. Unnecessary mistakes that cause stress on the business owners and the business itself. They may not be fatal to the business, but all the unnecessary stress sure isn't making their job* any easier.

Here's my four-point guide to business that you don't have to pay $29.95 at Borders for. It isn't going to solve all your problems, but they're healthy fundamentals that aren't missing from good businesses.

Clearspeak.

I was fairly certain at one stage that most people were on the same wave-length as me. We generally had the same idea on what 'good' meant - good quality, good nature, good ethics. Given this idea, I made a conscious choice that I could sacrifice some level of communication when talking with other people because good people would 'get it'.

Then the internet came, and without the additional hints of gestures* and vocal recognition, it became paramount that my written word was made clearer so that I was understood. This quickly separated myself from the majority of other IRC users, many of whom were populating #funfactory and creating the foundations of today's txt-speak. This discipline to grammar that I exercised with extreme prejudice in my own written communication lead to my desire to start writing.

Surely since I could string a sentence together, I could be a writer, right?

Ubuntu.

I was talking today with someone about the different virtues Western societies promote compared to non-Western societies. In particular what came up regularly was the idea of isolation common in capitalist societies - the idea that a person's value is demonstrated by how well they can stand on their own two feet without the support of others.

The thought behind this is that a person's self-worth is more inherently valuable to the society when that person can survive and provide within their own means. They do not drain from the others around them, and are therefore not a liability to the societal economy. This is well evidenced by the value we place on economic-based milestones through early development; first bank accounts, pocket money, mandatory tax file number registration at high school. Most people consider moving out of their family's home to be the equivalent of a coming-of-age rite. It's when we get to feel like a Big Person.

Right now.

My lovely wife bought me a magazine yesterday, a periodical devoted to entrepreneurs and management-type people. It has key points on the cover like "Learning from the young rich" and "Motivation is the key to success". Bono's there with his weird glasses looking out of place with the corporate blue backdrop and non-rock'n'roll typeface floating around his head.

I've read more than half of the articles in the magazine now, and all of them seem to have the same premise, a familiar one I find in a lot of business literature;

You want money now.
I've got money. I can tell you how to get money.
It's a spiritual thing. It's a people thing.
You should do what I do.
And here's an advert for what I'm selling.
This is how I do it. You should do it like this and make money now.

Thing is, a lot of these guys have good ideas I agree with. Great ideas. Common sense business ideas that no matter how many times they are reiterated with catchy slogans ("The attitude that matters is gratitude!"), people forget them. So what's my problem with this style of advice? Two things!, one small and one not-as small.

My vote on game censorship.

I've been meaning to do this for a while now, but I've wanted to dedicate a good few hours to it, and these days in my adult and criminal life I struggle to find the time to link a few good hours together. So alternately, I'll try getting my thoughts together over a few sittings, so forgive if it gets a little long and disjointed.

I'm unsure exactly where to start this, so I'm going to go with the central thought that runs through every argument I come across: Michael Atkinson is allowing children to participate in adult content. Regardless of what he says, his actions prove vastly different in the real world outside of his politics. He's quite happy to talk political rhetoric about his constituents, how the OFLC has failed to hold up its own regulations and that the vested groups behind the R18+ rating are solely economically interested in the debate. He admits to the censorship label of his politics, and talks quite candidly about his own children playing the video games he disagrees with.

(Didn't realise this got so long. Follow the cut for the rest!)

TTYL!

It wasn't until today, when saying goodbye to my mum with "See you in L.A.!", that I realised how close we are to leaving for Vegas.

I'm excited! Food, shows, and the wedding of course. I'm coming back a married man!

I'm actually more excited than a single exclamation mark can express, but multiple exclamations could be construed more as a form of instability than excitement. Just take my word for it: I'm a little jumping boy on the inside.

-Anthony

one two three woah!