Building your network is fundamental to finding or generating opportunities. Film schools are a great place to meet like-minded people, even if you don't want to enrol. Many film schools have crewing nights where the productions call for volunteers from the community or the administration people can take your details and pass it on to students looking for crew members. Community television stations can also be a great place to meet people and learn.

I don't know if it's an Australian thing but I like to use all numbers. Scene number, shot number, take number. Way easier and faster for data entry/logging because you can just use number pad on keyboard. Also don't have to wait for the crew to finish laughing after the clapper decides he/she's a comedian and calls one-dildo-three.

Conversation between editor and director on unslated footage
"Use the shot with the dog"
"Which one?"
"The close up"
"Oh the one where he runs behind the tree"
"No the one where he is sitting still"
"There is no shot where he is sitting still"
"I'm sure we shot one after the tree shot"
"Which tree shot..."
Conversation between editor and director on slated footage:
"Use shot 1C"
"OK"

Repo man. So good.

I wouldn't really call it a stabiliser (or compare it to other stabilisers). If you use it with a shoulder mount it doesn't look any different to normal shoulder mount handheld. Just saves you a lifetime in physiotherapy bills. Even low weight rigs will give you back problems if you shoot hand held regularly, for long periods of time. I always request one on jobs where they want majority handheld.

I wasn't 100% convinced by the deconstruction. Many of the examples look like straight forward to "rule of thirds" shots. Definitely wasn't convinced by the "top half faces" bottom half "hands moving" example. That's just a standard mid shot. Their hands and eyes are exactly where I would expect them to be. There are only 3 shots shown that I thought demonstrated "interesting" results from quadrant thinking, and they all had important elements in the bottom right hand quadrant, without anything significant in the top right (where you might normally expect it).