I am humbled!

Went to the gym today and discovered that I'm not nearly as strong as I thought. On Friday when I went, I was with a small cross-section of my office and discovered I was in better shape than most of them. Today, I went with a different cross section and watched this fellow who's probably not nearly as tall or wide as I am lift three times my capacity.

That said, I had a great workout, beat my arms and shoulders and abs to death, and paid close attention to the muscles in my lower back, the ones I used when picking up my kids. Both of them still want to be carried from time to time, even though they're six and nine. I am getting stronger, but I fear the six-week crash. Also, toward the end of October I'll be taking a week off. I should probably buy a used bench before then; I have a weight set already.

Style watch

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a design and font queen. I'm not terribly good at it, mostly because I have no excuse for exercising my talents in my direction given the industrial nature of my current position, but I love watching other designers at work and admiring their portfolios.

Curt Clonigner has a book, Fresh Ideas in Web Design, in which he attempts to classify some common on-line styles. Mine is easy: I'm an HTML Minimalist. Everything must be done with CSS and Style; the content must stand on its own, arranged in such a way that the HTML content matches its semantic value, making it searchable and understandable, and it must degrade well. Javascript must be unnecessary (although it can be used as heavily as one likes to enhance the experience, so long as it in unnecessary for a viewer to acheive their goal). Flash is Teh Evil.

But there are other styles out there, and Clonginger documents: Mondrian, Grid, SuperTinySimCity, LoFi Grunge, PaperBag, Gothic Organic, Pixelate Punk, Drafting Table Transformer, 1950s Hello Kitty, 1970s DayGlo, HandDrawnAnalog, DustyCowboy.

I was thinking about that horrible church website and I was trying to come up with a name for it. And I have it: RolePlayingGame. Take a look. World of Warcraft. Hellgate 2038. The garish hypercolor art style, the dark backgrounds with contrasting text, all are there with New Birth Ministries. Anthore site with a similar but toned-down banner is KGoule, some designer guy's blog. The designer of that church site, Sharper FX, seems to definitely have this whole RPG style going for him in all the sites he's done, which is odd considering how much of his work is for churches.