I had an e-mail from British Gas today telling me that my bill is now ready to view online on their website. We use their paperless billing to reduce the junk that comes through the front door, but last time I went to their website (probably about 3 months ago when I got the previous bill) they’d move to a new ‘improved’ site:

However, their website now only allows me to see one of my 2 accounts (2 - I thought I only had one as a dual-fuel customer!) So if I want to manage my Gas and Electricity online I have to use 2 seperate e-mail addresses. I’ve phoned them up twice to ask about this and neither time could they tell me when it will be fixed. At least this time they said I could have the paper bills for free until it’s sorted. Aparently each of the accounts is related to a unique customer id which is used by the website, so I guess to them I’m 2 seperate people, sharing a name, house, and dual-fuel discount. What an odd system!

Today we took Abi to get her first real shoes - we’d originally tried to go yesterday, but were too close to the closing time for Clarks so they could just measure her, but there wasn’t time to sell us any shoes (huh?). Today we managed to get there in plenty of time, had her measured again and then had to choose the shoes - we ended up with these lovely ones (which Abi really likes):

Then tonight as she was going to bed, Abi found a glove in her bed (like you do ;)) and stood up, tried to put it on, winged a bit, handed it to me and held out her hand. I put the glove on, she was happy, laid down and went to sleep!!

//flv_ricky('video_swim','abi-swim');

I know this video has been on Laura’s facebook for a while, but I wanted it here too as it’s sooo cute!

Abi has been doing so well with her swimming and it’s lots of fun taking her. Last week, she had her first solo underwater swim - which meant she swam between the instructor and me underwater. (It was only a very short distance, but amazing!) Tomorrow is her last session of the current term, which seems to have flown by, but we’re now booked onto the next term so it’ll only be a weeks gap in between.

This morning just as I was leaving for work, Abi decided that she wanted to follow me as she often does and came crawling after me towards the front door and peered round it as I opened it and then continued to go through the doorway. At this point Laura picked her up and stood her on the floor a little way back from the doorway. She took a step to the side!! I know it’s only a little step but it was a big moment for us and we’re very pleased with her!

[Baby -Abi](http://samespirit.net/ricky/audio/abibaby.mp3) (mp3)

After problems with the weekend workshop that we’d originally booked on we finally got round to Abi’s first swimming lesson today.

She seemed a bit nervous as we were waiting to get into the pool and watching the previous class finish as they did they’re underwater swims and being thrown towards their parents. However she loved it once we were in. She loved having the other babies (She was the oldest in the group for a change) around and watching them and seemed to have lots of fun with the lesson itself. She did very well with her holding onto the side and loved her splashing into the pool as usual. The highlight though was floating on her back - she’s never been particularly happy with floating and I hadn’t got the hang of how to hold her before, but they showed us a different way to do it and she was brilliant - she seemed to love it.

Can you go splish splish splish like a little fish? splish splish A fish that goes splish splish splish

A fish goes splish splish splish
But what goes splosh?

A baby giraffe!

<img src="http://samespirit.net/ricky/images/giraffe.png" style="float:left;"></img>Can you go splash splash splash like a baby giraffe?
  splash splash
A giraffe that goes splash splash splash
when he's having his bath splash splash

A fish goes splish splish splish;
a giraffe goes splash splash splash;
but what goes splosh?

An albatross!

Can you go splosh splosh splosh like an albatross?
  splosh splosh
diving in the sea splosh splosh
when he's finding his tea splosh splosh

Found from: techblog:

tail -f /var/log/apache2/access_log | sed "s/rss/Ctrl+vCtrl+[[41;1mrssCtrl+vCtrl+[[0m/g"

This example is looking for people accessing the rss feed so I can see how frequently it gets hit (whilst still seeing what else is going on). With this I spotted that one of the Firefox extensions I was using(piclens) was automatically downloading the detected rss feed with every page access. It’s a nice extension and I can see why it does that, but I don’t want to be accessing rss feeds automatically and potentially multiple times as I use sites.

This morning just as I was getting ready to leave for work I came back through into the dining room to see Laura and Abi, but Laura was in there on her own. - Abi had gone off for an explore as she’s been doing more and more recently. When I got through to the living room, I saw Abi had got some thing in her mouth, and unusually it looked quiet big, so I went round to investigate further and discovered she had the lid to our Nandos’ peri-peri ketchup in her mouth covered in ketchup and the bottle was laying on the floor next to her.

Now I find the ketchup quite hot, so can only have a small amount - but she didn’t seem to have a problem with it! Fortunately the bottle hadn’t spilt on the carpet - just on the leg of her sleep suit.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading a selection of articles on design and design theory, so I decided to make some tweaks to my blog design to try out some of these ideas.

Overall the new design is pretty similar to how it looked before, but some of the key things I’ve changed are:

Tabs now look a lot better</h4

I’ve changed the tabs to use a roll-over image instead of CSS colours and hackery. This makes it look more consistent across different browsers and I think it looks tidier.

Typography

The whole design has much more of a vertical rhythm to it than the previous version and the font sizes and colours have been more thought out.

Background Image

I thought the main content area looked a bit white, so I decided to add a bit more colour with a nautical chart (well a tracing of one) of Kefalonia - the same place as the original photo for the header image was taken.

Removal of timeline

I was finding that it I was just having to click an extra time to get to the latest entries in my blog, so I’ve decided to go back to a more traditional blog front page.