Practicalmadness

The preceding title has no particular meaning. Except perhaps this: is it just me, or does Zwan really, really, really suck?

I’m sure you know about those people. You know, those people who you see gathering around the front door to Bally’s at 5 AM, or popping into Starbucks somewhere closer to eight or nine still wearing jogging shorts and a fashionably shabby white T-shirt with a health club access card on their key ring. Or even that co-worker, classmate, friend, etc., who’s always “on [their] way to the gym.”

I am now one of those people. As part of our organization’s Restructuring of Life Plan, I now have my health club membership that, at least for today, I am pointedly not using.

Yesterday marked the signing of the contract and the grand tour of the facility, in that order. This particular local chain (which will remain nameless for the protection of the innocent) has several clubs in the area, all of which are better equipped than this one, which happens to be less than a mile from my house.

The layout is really interesting in the sense that it’s a logical layout, and yet one that seems to enforce a certain health-club caste system. On one side of the ground floor, there’s the LifeCycles™, treadmills and simple cardio equipment, operated by female professionals and older men whose doctors have told them they really mean it this time. On the other, there’s the actual weightlifting stuff in a room filled with big, buff guys who probably have a football or basketball fantasy on a picture-in-picture in their minds even when having sex.

On the right, you have reasonable expectations and the tools to help achieve those expectations. On the left, you have a Soloflex commercial. Guess where I’ll be handing in my pound of flesh.

Considering that I have no intention of honoring my one-year membership commitment¹, I feel like I’m coming out of this with a huge bargain. I have their lowest possible monthly rate, and yet with no restrictions on when I can use the club, and they even threw in two months of the latest innovation in personal fitness: personal trainer by proxy. I get two free sessions with an actual trainer, after which they program me into a computer which then prints out a daily workout routine for me based on my physical capabilities, fitness goals and whether the check cleared or not.

It’s an entire program based around the concept that most gymgoers have no idea what they’re doing (besides spending $50/month and upwards on a major status symbol, that keychain card) and will spend an additional fortune each month to glean some actual benefit from their workouts, or at least feel like they are.

It’s brilliant. I mean, it’s one thing to capitalize on your customers’ stupidity by drawing them into expensive long-term contracts. But to get them to pay even more money by acknowledging that they have no idea what they’re doing and offering to help? Bally should rip off and patent this. Hell, forget Bally — someone call Microsoft.

A sideshow of a sideshow

Meanwhile, speaking of Microsoft, you may be noticing that this blog’s design has changed yet again. And if you’re among the estimated 95%+ of us who use Internet Explorer for Windows, you may wonder what kind of cracked-out sadist I am to have made the navigation on the left side of the pages so, well, cracked out.

Allow me, if you will, to explain. This latest design (that incorporates elements of the last five or six variations, and that I’m actually rather happy about) is built using only structural HTML and ample Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) stylings. This was not motivated by ideology (e.g., “Structural markup is evil cant and must be purged from all thought!”) or trendiness as much as by the fact that I am very stupid, and growing moreso (also blind, lazy and impatient) with each passing day, and I’d truly much rather write one or two lines of code instead of ten whenever feasible.

This is where Windows IE users will have some problems, because IE/Win has incomplete support for the CSS2 selectors I’m using to present the new left-hand menu as an indented list of links, rather than the mishmashed disaster you may be seeing. There is a workaround; I just haven’t gotten around to doing it yet.

There is, of course, another problem: the big, painted-esque stripe that covers the topmost 100 pixels of the pages is a transparent, 24-bit PNG. Internet Explorer is jus’ fine with dem PNG files, but it don’t cotton to no alpha-channel transparency, instead just turning everything blue.

This is an even easier fix: since PNG-24s are fuckin’ huge anyway, I’ll just replace it with a JPEG at some near juncture. Nice and conservative — kinda like Roy’s Rock without the Roy, the rock or the insane mockery of the American judicial system.

Mac and Linux users will likely see things exactly as I have intended, as Internet Explorer for Mac and all the major alternative browsers have full CSS2 support. If you’re such a huge Practical fan that you simply must see the new design in all its glory right fucking now, may I recommend Mozilla or any of its sister browsers?

But the more pleasant upshot of all this is that I’ve finally chosen a font to stick with: Helvetica. Until next week, when I’ll go totally insane [again] and switch to Comicraft-Spills. Or maybe Webdings.

Or —ooh! — Comic Sans!

Addenda

Starting right…about…_now_(!) the Extended Entry portion of any given post is now reserved exclusively for footnotes, for all that D.F. Wallace goodness.²