I am a dolt.

That’s right, kids. I, being the all-powerful way-into-it recap artist that I am, idiotically forgot about Survivor. It was almost a half-hour into the show before I realized my dolt-ness. And I’m sure many of you think I’m going to make the connection between “Rob-doltness” and “Robb-doltness” but I just can’t bring myself to make fun of spoiled skater-punks after they’ve had a love-the-world, love-a-long-lost-father epiphany.

Because I am a true professional, I have decided to entirely make up what I missed. Serves me right. Last week, I complained that the show has become too predictable. The gods must have heard my complaints.

Let the Surprises and Twists Begin!
In a surprising twist, Shii Ann discovers a magic Harry Potter wand smoldering at Camp Sook Jai and decides to wreak havoc on her not-quite-mature-enough-to-freaking-enjoy-their-amazing-surroundings tribe.

The first thing she does is zap Robb with a “Recall everything he’s ever heard drunk self-help book readers say while spilling their guts to him as he bartends” spell. He resists, but its reflective effects are already starting to play tricks with his mind. Here we see him thinking, “Life is like catching a wave on my skateboard.

Soon enough I’d realize, ‘Whoa dudes, like this isn’t even a surfboard’ and I’d fall off and lose the skateboard in the water but someday when I’m eating fish, I’d like notice that there’s a wheel inside the fish and I’d contemplate how that fish was caught and then I’d realize, ‘Whoa dudes, like that fish must’ve eaten my skateboard.’ Talk about karma.”

All the others miss Stephanie, which is sort of like how guys miss their miserable bitch girlfriend after they break up only because she was good in bed. Robb continues to ponder. Having the benefit of starting to remember drunk self-help advice, he comes to a grand realization, “Dudes! I hung out with Jed and he was booted. I hung out with Stephanie and she was booted. I thought everyone didn’t like Shii Ann, but… And people told me they were voting for Shii Ann instead of my friend, so… These people have been yupping me along! They think that they can just tell me what I want to hear and that I’ll go on enjoying life. They are actually playing a game for a million dollars! I need to warn people!”

Rounded corners. To promote both safety and cleanliness, locker room design should include as many rounded corners as possible. This makes it easier to access areas where mold and mildew are likely to grow, and will soften the look and feel of the room.

Non-porous grout. Using a high-strength epoxy grout in tiled areas allows for easier cleaning and will stand up better to the high-impact floor cleaners many facilities use to eliminate mildew.

Temperature and circulation. Low humidity and proper ventilation are crucial in locker room environments. The following levels are recommended by the ACSM guidelines: Temperature, 72 to 78 degrees Fahrenheit in both dry and wet areas;

Humidity, 60 percent or less in both areas;

Air circulation, eight to 12 exchanges in dry areas and 20 to 30 exchanges in wet areas. Likewise, air exchanges should have an appropriate mix of outside and inside air. While the mix is commonly only 10 percent outside air, ACSM recommends a preferable mix of 40 percent.

Ask members

Obviously, each facility has its own unique needs and membership. If you are uncertain what will please members most, ask them. Remember, the locker room is the one area of a fitness facility where everyone is an expert. Open your ears and you’ll likely hear some great ideas.

Ironing supplies. Many executive locker rooms now offer ironing supplies so members can press their clothes before heading back to the office.

Keyless lockers. Using keyless security systems alleviates the need for members carrying a key during their workout. Access is gained by using personalized member codes or membership cards.

Basic design elements

Whether you are building a new facility or working with an existing one, there are some basic elements that should be considered when creating locker room atmosphere. These include:

Privacy. While many members have no qualms about changing in front of others or sharing space, there are others who appreciate any opportunity for privacy. This includes providing curtains on showers and, if possible, a separate changing room just outside the shower stall with at least one shelf and hooks for robes or clothing.

Family rooms. More and more facilities are offering private spaces that allow parents to accompany children of the opposite sex in changing areas. These areas also offer additional space to members with physical disabilities who may need extra room while changing.

Separate wet and dry areas. For safety and comfort reasons, clubs should separate wet and dry areas as much as possible. Ideally, facilities should offer “in-between areas” that divide the locker room, and offer people a place where they can groom away from members who are changing or washing. This also alleviates the problem of personal items like makeup bags or shaving kits getting wet.

Lighting. Lighting is essential to the overall feel of a room and can influence member satisfaction. As Keeler of Langdon Wilson Architecture points out, “Members come to a club to feel good about themselves. If they look in the mirror and appear too green or too blue, they’re not going to be happy.” To avoid harsh light, Lavoie suggests using indirect lighting techniques, such as placing fixtures on top of lockers, which bounces light off the ceiling and produces a warm, bright ambience in the room.

Small touches

While cleanliness is crucial, it’s important to create a room that’s warm and not sterile, says Robert Keeler, associate partner with Langdon Wilson Architecture in Newport Beach, Calif. Outfitting your locker room with amenities like shampoo, lotion and shaving cream help to provide a feeling of hominess and convenience to members, and offer a nice design touch. These items can be purchased in bulk quantities and are often available in dispensers customized with your club name or logo. Adding your logo not only enhances name recognition, but helps associate your facility’s name with customer service and something “extra.”

Other amenities that tell members you care about service details include:

Swimsuit dryers. If your facility is equipped with a pool or spa, members will love the convenience of leaving with a dry suit (most dryers work in just seconds, allowing for high usage).

Guest telephones. Offering guest phones is a nice way to let members use the telephone without tying up business lines. Plus, since they work as a pay phone, it’s a good way to generate extra income.

Drinking water. This is especially important if your locker room offers high-temperature environments such as saunas or steam rooms. A water cooler or drinking fountain allows members to rehydrate after a workout, or quickly feed their thirst before heading to the juice bar for bottled water, frozen smoothies or sport drinks.

Hair dryers. Some members may bring their own, but more and more people are looking to clubs to provide them. Depending on your membership size, offer at least two dryers in each locker room.

Spray deodorant. Again, many members will bring their own, but for those who forget, it’s a much-appreciated amenity.

Hair spray. Small pump bottles attached to a cord (to prevent loss) offer another savior when members forget their supplies.

Feminine hygiene products. Some clubs offer these gratis via baskets or containers placed inside restroom stalls. If your facility cannot afford to do so, install machines where items can be purchased.

Fresh flowers and/or plants. Plants and flowers instantly liven and warm a room. If working on a tight budget, ask a local florist to donate arrangements to your facility in exchange for their business card displayed alongside the arrangement. Many florists have “extra” flowers and may be enticed by the free advertisement.

In terms of facility operation, you might say the locker room is the stepchild of the fitness facility. While much attention and money is paid to other areas of the fitness center (i.e., weight and cardio rooms, aerobics rooms), the locker room is often an afterthought to many club operators, receiving less-than-needed attention to help gain and retain members.

Luckily, with a few minor additions and/or modifications, you can transform your locker area into an inviting atmosphere that not only pleases members but sets your club apart from the competition. According to architect Hervey Lavoie, president of Ohlson Lavoie Corp. in Denver., Colo., “The locker room is the one area where a club can really distinguish itself in terms of member comfort and quality of accommodation.” Lavoie says that while not every member will have an opinion about the weight room, given the chance, most everyone will have something to say about the locker room. “People have a similar environment in their own home, so it’s easy to have an opinion about it,” Lavoie says.

To evaluate just how accommodating your locker room is, consider the following areas and determine whether there’s room for improvement in your facility.

Maintenance

It may sound elementary, but many clubs still do not adhere to the golden rule of locker room maintenance: Keep it clean! No matter how luxurious the accommodations, when members see water on countertops, trash cans full or towels strewn across the floor, they are left with an impression of poor service and poor attention to detail. Remember that in a service-driven business, it is the small touches that often speak loudest to customers.

“If you’re going to have clean locker rooms, it means you’re going to have to police them,” Lavoie says. This means having one staff member inspect and straighten the locker area every hour. Trash should be emptied, counters should be wiped down, mirrors should be cleaned and there should be no water or towels on the floor. Everything should also be in good working order, meaning there are no jammed lockers, dripping faucets, stopped toilets, broken shower heads or burned-out bulbs. Any maintenance problems should be fixed as soon as possible, and proper signage should be posted to let members know you are aware of the problem.

Learning for disabled kids forgotten in Reading Wars

Despite the fact that around 10 per cent of Australians have a learning disability, the much vaunted report on teaching reading released at the end of last year has essentially ignored them, said Senator Lyn Allison today.

Brendan Nelsons final report of the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy called Teaching Reading, hardly mentions the preferred and recommended strategies for helping children with learning difficulties and disability to learn essential literacy skills,Senator Allison said.

Not only do all children learn differently but a sizable minority experience extra difficulties in acquiring literacy skills. What about the needs of these children?

Reading Recovery programs cut out after Grade 1, the Federal tutoring voucher program has had a low take-up, as predicted, and the Minister’s insistence on testing and reporting has not assisted children with specific learning difficulties.

I wish Julie Bishop well as the new minister for education and training and hope she shows more interest in working with the states to help children with learning disability than her predecessors,Senator Allison said.

The National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy fails to take into account the cause of some students lack of literacy skills and how best to help these studentssaid Jenny Shaw, President of the Australian Learning Disability Association.

The report ignores the barriers and learning requirements that students with learning disabilities, in particular dyslexia, face daily in the classroom. The Australian Learning Disability Association is disappointed that the needs of up to 15 percent of the school population have been ignored,she said.

Hon Kate Reynolds
Australian Democrats Member of the Legislative Council
Democrats Spokesperson on Aboriginal Affairs, Ageing, Children’s Services, Disability Services, Equal Opportunity, Education, Family & Youth Services, Further Education & Training, Gambling, Housing, Local Government, Recreation & Sport, Social Justice (including Refugees), Tourism, Youth & Volunteers.

Please note that all times given are EST.

The Moon leaves earthy Capricorn and enters airy Aquarius at 4:53 a.m. The first aspect Moon in Aquarius makes is a beneficial trine to Jupiter in airy Gemini, exact at 9:39 a.m. Travel, study, and communication in groups are all encouraged under this combination, especially if it involves unconventional, unusual places, subjects, or people. Perhaps the ideal situation would be a group of likeminded people en route to a convention. Deep-breathing exercises are also favored. Air signs Gemini, Libra and Aquarius will find themselves in the thick of things this morning; Libra in particular will relish its natural role as mediator and feel wonderfully, if temporarily, balanced this morning. Fire signs Aries, Leo and Sagittarius will contribute their naturally high spirits to the morning’s activities, because 11:03 a.m. marks the exact Moon sextile Mars in Sagittarius. However, Leo must make a special effort to mix with everyone in the group, not just the high-ranking “important” ones, or the Lion will be seen as a snob; Sagittarius will have the highest energy of all the signs, but also is more likely to be even more blunt and “foot-in-mouth-ish” than usual. Remember, Archer, to take others’ feelings into consideration this morning, particularly the more sensitive Water signs Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces, who are likely to feel like the archetypal “fish out of water” this morning. Earth signs Taurus, Virgo and Capricorn may feel (or be made to feel) too practical and fuddyduddyish this morning, but these signs in particular should be encouraged to voice their “what-if” concerns; it’s that old “ounce of prevention” thing.

The Sun in Pisces makes its first major contact to another planet today: the challenging square to Jupiter in Gemini, exact at 5:39 p.m. This is the classic “biting off more than you can chew” aspect. Taking a look at the signs involved in this square, Pisces tends to look at the world through rose-colored shades, while the planet Jupiter always wants to expand; its motto is “too much is never enough.” So this particular combination sets people up for disappointment, disillusion. This is not to say that absolutely no good can come from this square; more can be accomplished under hard aspects than easy ones. But it would be misleading to claim that there will be no confusion or mixed emotions under this aspect, particularly for Mutable signs Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces. There may also be breaking news involving foreign affairs (ruled by Jupiter) which will stem from last Sunday’s difficult Mars/Jupiter opposition; since the Sun/Jupiter contact is a square, it does not bode well for harmony or compromise.

The final aspect of today is the Moon conjunct Neptune, exact at 7:36 p.m. Although both the Moon and Neptune are posited in airy Aquarius, the effect of this conjunction will feel remarkably Piscean. This is because planets are stronger than signs; Neptune rules the Water sign Pisces, while the Moon is also a feminine planet, ruler of watery Cancer. So what does this conjunction mean?

Inspiration and intuition will be strong, although so will all forms of escapism, perhaps as a response to the difficult Sun/Jupiter square. People of all signs are likely to root for the underdog, and idealistic, humanist organizations should get together to try to make their dreams become reality.

Fixed signs Taurus, Leo, Scorpio and Aquarius may feel overwhelmed by it all emotionally, especially Aquarius, who usually manages to be detached from messy emotions. Air signs Gemini and Libra will handle this Lunar conjunction more smoothly, and Fire signs Aries and Sagittarius will find opportunities, although especially Sagittarius should keep alert in his/her local environment. “Blind spots,” either literal or figurative, are likely with Neptune conjunctions. It’s a great time to sell ice to Eskimos, but not a great time to buy anything.

That’s not easy to do if you’re trying to assess the role of e-business in your future. You may work for an organization, for example, that has recently declared it is getting involved in a “B2B trading site.”

Is your company on the right track? Maybe not. Countless chief executive officers in various industries are announcing in media conferences that they have established an “on-line B2B initiative” that will be used to support “billions of dollars of purchasing.”

Although it can make for great press, generate huge market valuations for the business-to-business companies involved and leave senior managers convinced they are finally headed in the right direction, it may be smoke and mirrors.

Once the floodlights are turned off and the cameras stop rolling, you may find many executives going back to ignoring e-business. Worse, many of the initiatives announced will die on the vine for lack of executive support unless management demonstrates it is prepared to spend significant sums of money to link their “back-end systems” to the Web.

So how do you judge whether your company is serious about B2B? Take the time to find out how real e-business will be deployed, by understanding the technology that will be at the heart of any e-commerce effort — what is known as “middleware.”

When the Internet was an infant, companies such as International Business Machines and Oracle developed what are known as APIs (application programming interfaces), tools that would allow a company to link an existing large-scale database to a Web site.

This was a huge development in the history of e-commerce, as it permitted firms to extend their transaction and financial systems to their customers and suppliers.

Federal Express attracted a lot of admirers in the mid-nineties when it permitted people to query its systems on the status of shipped packages. Big banks found that they had a tool to link their systems to a Web site, leading to the rapid emergence of on-line banking. Airlines could do the same, leading to Web-based on-line reservation systems.

Over time, these tools evolved into a more sophisticated category of software, called middleware. Today, several tools and programs allow a company to link its back-end financial, enterprise management, accounting, inventory and other transaction systems to a Web site. It is through such tools that real B2B will be deployed.

Which brings us back to the current round of announcements.

True B2B is a huge effort that involves large-scale hiring, massive budget resources and an organizational fervour dedicated to the task of linking a back-end system to the Web. If a company isn’t doing that, then it’s demonstrating little more than it knows how to generate a bit of media ink

Attracting customers online is tough; keeping them can be next to impossible. When online movie superstore Reel.com launched deep-discount sales in the past, it could never figure out how many first-time customers were likely to come back and buy again. Nor did the company have a way of understanding which customers it acquired during the sale were price-sensitive and more likely to jump on future sales. OVERVIEW
KEY TECHNOLOGY
Data-mining software and analytics.

ROLE
Real-time tracking, mapping of consumer behavior, capable of digital “conjoint analysis.”

PRIME MARKET APPLICATIONS
Financial services, online consumer retail.

Faced with nagging questions about how best to push products and understand customers, last summer Reel (a subsidiary of offliner Hollywood Entertainment) finally decided to go deep — into its own data — and test-drive new consumer behavior-tracking software from 2-year-old Boston startup Verbind. When Reel next announced a $12.50 fire sale for the sci-fi thriller The Matrix on DVD, Verbind’s data agent was standing by to watch each customer’s every move.

Results poured in immediately. The Emeryville, Calif.-based retailer was able to distinguish the price-sensitive buyers from the frequent shoppers and the preorder types from the rest, and track which customers jumped for big sales and which wouldn’t buy, no matter what. In effect, the tracking software was already helping Reel save money by targeting sales to specific customers.

Called LifeTime, Verbind’s software jumps far beyond analyzing customer behavior; it’s real-time marketing that predicts a customer’s next move by knowing past behavior. Moreover, LifeTime allows companies an effective way to market and communicate with customers via email and interactive messaging.

Getting Your Mind Set
You can maintain control of your waistline and still enjoy some holiday treats. Don’t fall into these thinking traps — reverse the thought and you will follow through.

Thinking trap: “I’ve already blown it today with those sweets, I might as well eat the rest!”
Reverse thought: “The next food choices I make will be lower in calories and fat to make up for this treat” or “I do enjoy treats, but since I had quite a few today, I will avoid sweets for the next two days.”

Thinking trap: “I can’t enjoy the holidays without certain special foods.”
Reverse thought: “In order to enjoy these special higher calorie foods, I will cut back on calories at other meals, or increase my exercise” or “I can eat less of these especially rich foods, or find a recipe that is lower calorie so I can enjoy it more often.”

Thinking trap: “I am too busy to cook healthy meals and exercise; I’ll wait until the new year to start dieting.”
Reverse thought: “I can make good choices even at fast-food places — I don’t want to have to diet after the holidays are over.”

Be realistic about your goals. Maintaining your weight during the holidays is an accomplishment — this could be your holiday gift to yourself.

Make decisions about your eating behavior before hand in order to stay in control. Maybe making cookies as your gift to the neighbors is a bad idea — give a craft instead. Decide how you will handle alcohol intake with the many opportunities to drink. Where will you store candies and sweets in your kitchen — right on the counter to nibble every time you pass, or put out of sight for conscious-decision eating?

At Home
If you are making holiday goodies at home, chew gum while baking. Make smaller cookies. Wrap the gifts up as soon as possible. Cut back on the regular sweets you keep around (such as ice cream) as the food gifts come in the door. If you are going to enjoy a treat, sit down at the table with a plate and napkin and savor every bite — don’t gobble them while running the vacuum.

Plan some simple low-fat meals, such as casseroles, so you and the family can get a good meal before heading out to shop. Spend money at the malls on gifts, not junk food.

Keep exercising! Even if the weather is bad or the time is tight, find creative ways to burn calories. Dust off those videotapes and do one before work. Take a walk in the sunny time of the day on the weekends — the sunlight will activate vitamin D and the serotonin boost will improve your mood.