As a radio man, my usual routine in the morning revolves around listening to as much wireless as possible, usually switching between national stations upstairs on the clock radio, a local station in the kitchen while I have my breakfast and then something speech based in the car on my way to the office.

Not this week though. While watching my breakfast I've been giving the new morning show from ITV a try. It has replaced GMTV which was largely responsible for launching the TV careers of Eamonn Holmes, Dr. Hillary Jones, Fiona Phillips and Penny Smith.

It is early days for the new show that launched after much fanfare for poaching Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley who proved popular on the BBC's One Show. Their chemistry is apparently what turned their previous show into a ratings winner, and I must admit I have enjoyed watching them this week.

The features seem to me to be more news orientated than GMTV used to be, there have been some very strong items including a look at what happened to those who lost out over the Farepak collapse two years ago, and interviews with Tony Blair and Prince Charles.

There are some things which still need work though, several blogs I've read have picked up on the ridiculously easy quiz question, and the "Something cool before the kids go to school" feature feels like it could be running out of steam already.

The most noticeable difference for the new show is the set, which has a very impressive view over London, although I do wonder what will happen as winter draws in and the mornings get noticeably darker!

Overall I think that ITV Daybreak has had an impressive first week and I have high hopes that it will continue to do well. I expect there will be some producers responsible for BBC Breakfast having a few tough conversations too as it does make their offering look a little tired and dull. It's no competition for the radio in the car though!

It's one of those days that people talk about afterwards and say, I'll always remember where I was when I heard the news. Nine years ago today, the world changed. Ceremonies are taking place in New York and Washington to mark the anniversary. An unforgivable tragedy, the like of which I hope we never see again.

Earlier this year I moved my main website over to flavors.me which is a great new way of creating a personal site that acts of a kind of hub to connect all that social stuff we all accumulate online these days. What appealed to me about the site was the simple way that it could be configured to give a custom look while at the same time successfully pulling in data from a number of other locations. My site isn't the most exiting I have ever seen, indeed it is nothing compared to some of the fantastic examples you can see in the new directory but in some ways that suits me because I want to keep it simple. As well as making use of flavors.me I've also made a few other changes to my web presence, of which this site is part. I now run my main blog here on wordpress. This allows me to do longer form posts, sometimes with pictures, and have a nice looking theme. Meanwhile I will now use my Posterous site as a more of a photo blog and place for useful graphics or videos which I come across. This is mainly because of the ease that media can be sent into it, and the way it automatically shares posts elsewhere. Finally I have revamped my tumblr. I've had one ever since Pownce closed but was never really sure what to do with it. I must admit I like the way it works and I did toy with the idea of making it the home of my blog but there is still something stopping me that I can't quite put my finger on. So for the time being I'm using it as a lifestream, pulling in blog posts, tweets, rss links and photos. For now this is a setup which I'm relatively happy with but just like the rest of the internet, things are always changing, so we'll see how it goes.

I don't normally like to criticise the way companies do business. There are plenty of people doing that on the internet already. There is one company however, who have served us so spectacularly badly over the past few days that I have singled them out for special treatment. [I should point out that this post goes into a bit of a long story here, if you want the condensed version feel free to jump to the last paragraph!] For Christmas, my father in law decided he would buy us a new TV, he knew we had been considering getting one for a while and thought it would be a good present. We were of course very grateful for that and accepted his kind offer. So, during that dull void between Christmas and New Year we went into Currys and looked at the TV's they had available. We had already decided that the best plan would be to get the TV delivered so they could take away the old one to be recycled. (we changed our mind about this in the end but still foolishly opted for delivery). Having settled on a particular make and model of TV, we went home to order it online. The whole ordering process was very simple and straight forward and within a few minutes we had paid for a 37" TV to be delivered on 7 January. Unfortunately, Currys couldn't make that delivery happen because of the snow and ice. I wasn't that disappointed, we still had a working TV so I re-arranged the delivery for the following Friday, the 15 January or so I thought. On Tuesday 12 January I returned to my desk from a meeting to find a message on my mobile voicemail from a Currys delivery driver stating that my TV should have been on his van that day but it hadn't been loaded for some reason, and to call the customer service number to re-arrange delivery. Except that I wasn't expecting them to deliver it for another 3 days. Having called the number I discovered that a delivery had indeed been booked for Tuesday 12 January without my knowledge. Anyway I didn't worry about it too much as I managed to rebook the delivery for the Saturday 16 January, which would mean neither of us would need to take time off work to accept it. Part of the deal with Currys is they give you a number to call after 9pm the evening before your delivery is due for an automated system to give you a time slot. So on Friday night I called the number and was duly told that my TV would be delivered the following morning between 7.30am and 11.30am. Great I thought, we can get up and do chores around the house and then go out and enjoy the day after the delivery guys have been. Well, 11.30 yesterday morning came and there was no sign of the expected delivery. Leave it half an hour I said, they might have been delayed by traffic or whatever. We left it for a full hour and a half, but still nothing so I called Customer Services. I was told that they couldn't see my delivery slot on their system, but my goods were due to be delivered today so the person on the phone would email the "distribution centre" to find out what had happened and get them to give me a call. An hour and a half later, we were still waiting. No phone call, nothing. So my wife called the same number again. This time she is told that the "distribution centre" have up to 4 hours to respond to emails. The person she spoke to said again that he would try and contact them to find out what had happened, and either he or they would come back to us before the end of his shift at 3pm. As you might guess, we arrived at 3.30pm and still there was no phone call, so I called again. This time I was told that my goods had not even been loaded onto the lorry and were never going to arrive. Needless to say, this made me quite cross. I asked to make a complaint and was given a complaint reference number, although I was never actually asked what my complaint was. The person on the phone offered to rebook the delivery, but we have now decided that we will cancel the order and take our business somewhere else. Now, I am not an unreasonable person, I understand that the weather can effect deliveries and sometimes they just can't go ahead as planned. That's fine, I didn't have a problem with that. The issue is having to wait 5 hours from when a delivery was supposed to have been made, to be told that it was never actually coming in the first place. That kind of communication failure is an appalling way to treat customers and one that will cost Currys my business in the future.

Now things are beginning to get back to normal, I've finally got chance to write a bit more about the weather we have had over the past few days.

I'm sure you don't need me to to tell me that the conditions recently have been quite unusual for the time of year. Don't get me wrong, I'm not handing this blog over to weather forecasts though.

The trouble is I'm bored of the snow now. I mean when we had that first lot back before Christmas it was a novelty. Now though, as the cold weather has lasted for almost 4 weeks I have had enough.

If we could all get back to normal now, and focus on the excitement that a forthcoming election will bring that would be great.

Having just moved house, we were hoping for a quiet few days before Christmas to get last minute preparations done, maybe unpack a few more boxes before the big day itself. It seems though, that wasn't to be, as not content with a bit of the white stuff at the weekend, we got a heavy covering yesterday afternoon and evening.

The net effect of this was the journey home from work turned into a nightmare for many, with roads gridlocked and vehicles struggling to get up the smallest of gradients. Personally my first problem was that I had been planning to get the bus home, but all services were suspended at lunchtime. Having managed to secure a lift home with the wife we then spent a total of around 4 hours driving from Newbury to Thatcham. A distance of some 3.8 miles which would normally take about 15mins.

The good news was that we made it home safely about 7pm last night, while unfortunately many others were forced to either abandon their vehicles or stay in emergency rest centres. The weather does seem to have been a bit better today, and certainly there has been no more snow although they are predicting further freezing temperatures overnight so I am not looking forward to the journey to work tomorrow morning.

So as I have already said on Facebook and Twitter, we finally exchanged contracts on the new place on Friday, with the move planned for next Friday (11th Dec) As you might expect, this is a pretty big deal for us. After 4 years of happily living in Salisbury, we are heading north to be closer to work, parents, friends and other stuff. Despite the short time frame, there is still loads to sort out including trying to find a removal firm who can actually help lug all our stuff the 50 miles up the A303. We thought we had it sorted of course, but in typical british style it has all gone a bit wrong at the last minute. It means that between now and the end of the week, we will be living an increasing number of boxes and bags, as things get sorted into that which has made the cut and is coming to the new place, or the other stuff which isn't. The most annoying thing as far as I am concerned is that because the place we're moving to is currently connected to the world using the Virgins*, we will need to have a BT line put in and god knows how long it will take to get broadband set up. The up side is that the new place can apparently take advantage of the BE Broadband network which is a bit of a result. *We had the Virgins here for a while, but what with being a pair of social butterflies (yeah right!) the package just wasn't value for money with TV channels that we never watched.