I’ve had a lovely week off between jobs. This week has mainly involved shopping for baby stuff, moving lots of things into a self storage unit, our second of three antenatal classes, hospital appointments, and a tour of the labour ward at Kings College Hospital in Dulwich.

Notes from the antenatal class

• Pain-relief in labour is really only needed before you start pushing. Pushing itself acts as a kind of pain-relief (apparently).
• Other 1st-stage pain-relief includes flanels soaked in (very) hot water on the back, the 3 massage techniques (ball of hand on base of spine, finger-nails making an ‘M’ shape on the back, and rotating thumbs all the way down either side of the spine).
• Ideal room temperature for babies is 18 degrees celcius.
• Remember to bring the baby’s ‘red book’ and ‘discharge papers’ (and car seat) to bring the baby home.
• For washable nappies, you will need 18 – 24 for each size. Exact quantity will depend on how often you wash them. Good brands include Tots Bots and Terry Nappy. You’ll need about 3 outer linings. Use microfibre.
• Use Bio-d detergent. No scented stuff. Try mother-ease.com.
• Nappies must be changed at least every 4 hours, regardless of whether it’s been used.
• Wool nappy covers with lanolin sanitises against bacteria!
• Newborns can use large folded muslin squares (80cm x 80cm) as nappies.
• Machine-wash nappies at 50 degrees with an extra rinse. Before putting the nappies in the wash, rinse them / soak them in a bucket of cold water – with a lid on. You can add some white vinegar / bi-carbonate soda. Don’t use nappy san.

Brain-dump over and out. Also, below is a lovely chart about room temperature and number of sheets / blankets to use for the baby.

I’ve always thought the leaving speeches people give when leaving our agency – when people gather round and your line manager talks about you – to be the closest thing to being at your own funeral. And the added bit of ‘here’s a selection of what people thought about x’ make it feel even more like a funeral. Almost expect someone to hang a wreath across my neck. It’ll be mine next week. Quite sad, but time to look forward. Experience-wise and people-wise, it’ll be a hard task for any workplace to live up to the last 2 years I’ve had here.

I feel as if, technology-wise, we’ve gone full circle. I remember the days computers became more powerful, able to store more data, and allowing us to do more things. It became safer, or more convenient, to store our precious things electronically. Things like photos, music, scanned certificates, movies, work, and so on. Storing these things physically at home would be ‘less safe’. Electronically, you can copy it and back it up. But as we begin hoarding things – like years of photos and music – our the act of backing things up get more tiresome. So we neglect it. And with one simple virus, blue screen of death or hard disk fatality, all we treasured dearly – and thought was safely stored away – can be gone. Just because we can dump it en masse onto numerous USB sticks doesn’t mean it’s more protected. Often on the contrary.

Physically storing things like photo albums and CDs on a shelf at home suddenly seems a lot safer – at least they aren’t under constant attack by viruses, technical errors and other security threats. I mean, it’s not as if your home is being attacked by burglars or arsenists daily. Losing our main PC and almost our laptop has taught us over-dependency on our gadgets is a dangerous thing …

Apparently there was an incredible meteor shower a few weeks ago. I heard about it on the Twitter grapevine but then forgot about it. Nevertheless, this landed in my inbox (captured brilliantly by Jeff Sullivan) and I probably wouldn’t have had as good a view as this anyway! Just serves to remind us that this world we live in, crafted beautifully by an awesome God, is really inspiring.

Working in the digital sphere and working with / pushing the boundaries of web technologies, one thing we often forget is that there are limits to what people can do on your website, for many particular types of sites. For these types of sites, you can’t expect your site to replace all other touchpoints with your users, but merely complement and enhance them. My wife, flicking through her IKEA catalogue mentioned “now I can see things more clearly”. What she meant was although the website’s great at helping her find products (good site navigational / organisational / labelling systems are in place) and inspire her by presenting different room styles, her experience then needs to go to the next stage further with offline interactions with the company.

To see products in more detail users will need to go in-store or at least pick up a catalogue. Catalogues are a different type of beast to websites. Websites are limited by a certain screen size / real estate and location-based restrictions whereas a catalogue, designed well, can be a leisurely browse over a cup of tea, or on a train-journey. And as more and more of what we do is online, from work to home-management, then I find that there’s more and more that I want to do offline. This particularly includes reading of articles or sanity checking my own work.

It’s so much harder to concentrate on something when staring at a screen. When it’s printed out, you can conveniently read it where you like, at your own pace, hold it at a comfortable height, you can mark it up and you can write all over it. These tasks are still, to some extent, not being adequately replaced by computers – though they may try. The more and more we do online, the more enjoyable things we do offline have become, and companies have to remember not to neglect this space but to take advantage of it and continue the experience through.

Particularly true to shopping for furniture and cars, to name but two.