Well, I've been a bit quiet on the blog front lately, largely due to the fact that we've finally moved house! Hurrah!

Here's a camera-phone snap of the moving van and sold sign, outside my fantastic new house in Stirchley in Birmingham. As you can probably gather, it's fantastic.

We're pretty much all settled in now, though the spare room is a bit of a swamp of boxes (you can walk across, but your feet tend to get stuck along the way). We even had a few hours of sunshine yesterday afternoon, meaning that we could get out into the garden and tackle the lawn, hedge etc. Fun!

I've also managed to save myself quite a lot of money by taking a bit of a different approach to the telephone in this new place. BT wanted £125 to re-install a phone line (someone had cut the cable), which I wasn't going to pay. This was a prompt to try my hand with VoIP (voice over internet protocol) instead. So, I signed up for cable broadband and bought myself a router with a phone jack on the back. After signing up with VoIPTalk, I can plug in my normal phone to the router and get much cheaper phone calls. In fact, there's pretty much a flat rate for calls to any part of the world. When you consider that Marla is from the US and we talk to people over there quite a bit, this is brilliant.

Rather bizarrely, as the thing is all routed through the internet, it doesn't matter where you claim to be located either. So, we've signed up for two phone numbers (a couple of quid each per month - cheaper than the line rental), one here in rainy Birmingham and the other a local San Diego number! So people in California can now make local calls, which get routed through to our house phone like normal! Amazing, really, and it all just seems to work, so far.

Anyway, furniture all in now - anyone want a washing machine?

One of the things which you generally have to do when you move to a new area is to get a new doctor and dentist. I hadn't actually changed my dentist for quite a while, and had been making the trips back to Kingswinford to visit the guy whom I'd seen for my whole life - until recently he retired.

Having bought my house and settled in, I decided it was time to get some new local services. Of course, the gossip and news concerning the NHS over the last few months and years had led me to be somewhat doubtful about my chances of fulfilling this task successfully. The last time I went to the dentist I paid a fair amount of money for the privilege, as the entire practice had gone private. I have to admit that I am also rather confused about the way in which dentists are organised in this country these days. There's continual stuff in the news about there not being enough - a couple of years ago I remember seeing queues around the block on television in Scarborough when a new NHS dentist opened. My brother also recently told me that he'd been accepted at a new dentist - but only since his fiancee was already a patient there. Grim prospects for me.

So, somewhat doubtful, yesterday I called up my local practice, the Cadbury Dental Practice in Bournville. I told them that I'd recently moved into the area and was looking for a dentist. "No problem, just let me take some details", said the cheerful woman on the phone. She asked if I also wanted a check-up, and I said that I did, at which point she offered me a cancellation spot for this morning. I was registered as an NHS patient automatically, and told that the current charges meant that I just had to pay around £15 per trip. She helpfully explained the price banding system, which means that even major surgery only costs me just over £100. Granted, this is the NHS, and I do believe that it should be free at the point of delivery, but it's a far cry from the long queues, family-friend networks and high prices at my previous (now private) practice.

This morning, I turned up - and yes, it is actually inside the Cadbury factory, and thankfully all was well with my teeth. There really is something ironic about having a dentist inside a chocolate factory, but having chuckled at that, I'm now sorted.

Registration with a new doctor was just as simple. I just called in this morning (both doctor and dentist are within easy walking distance), told them I'd moved in to the area, and filled out a couple of forms. They've offered me a health check next week.

So, is this a bit of a fluke and not at all typical of the NHS today? Are the stories we hear about in the press largely unfounded? Well, I don't know what the statistics are, but the NHS gets a big thumbs up from where I'm standing.

Aaagh, I've had to deal with so much crap packaging in the last few weeks that I could scream. Yesterday, we bought some nice slate place mats from House of Fraser, only to bring them back and have real difficulty getting the sticky "sale" labels off the things. This photo shows how far we got (we were doing one place mat each, complete with warm water etc) for about 15 minutes. Another 15 minutes later we'd got down to just the sticky residue left behind by the glue. Do the shops not realise that they are completely spoiling the products by doing this?

Right... deep breath, rant over. But seriously, I've had to deal with irremovable glue from a new trowel from Homebase, a chrome mixing bowl from Ikea which has been permanently marked by the residue left from the stickers which has tarnished its surface, and insane amounts of plastic in two layers packaging one of their battery chargers. I can calculate that I've spend around two to three hours attempting to remove packaging from things I've bought in the last month - and that's being conservative.

I've had in my mind for a while that there should be some kind of campaign to reduce the amount of packaging on every day purchases, and to make it easily removable. In essence, the idea that's been brewing in my head is C.R.A.P. The Campaign for the Reduction of Annoying Packaging. Daft idea? Let me know in the comments...

There are actually a few campaigns of the type being run in the UK. A quick web search shows up the Women's Institute campaign, the regional development agency in Yorkshire and the Humber, Yorkshire Forward has a campaign and the Independent newspaper has apparently also been campaigning on the subject.

So, I have one question... why is it acceptable for manufacturer and stores to attach ridiculous amounts of glue and layer upon layer of plastic to our purchases? I certainly don't want to buy the packaging, but I am being forced to.

So, the idea behind C.R.A.P. so far is that there is a fairly straightforward interactive website, where people can post in stories and pictures (like the one here) of packaging nightmares and unacceptable practises. The manufacturer or store would be named (there's nothing but the truth going here, so I don't think there's any legal issue) and perhaps there would be some kind of rating system for companies which do well and hence should be rewarded with our business.

Issues to be considered could be:

1. Amount of packaging. Is the packaging excessive?

2. Recycled / recyclable. Is the packaging easily recyclable?

3. Ease of removal. Can labels be easily peeled off leaving no trace? Can packaging be removed without having to be incredibly strong?

These are all just initial thoughts at the moment, but they've been in my head for a while now. I'd be interested to hear what other people think of the idea. Would it work? Are there any obvious things I've missed?

I've been thinking lately about what might happen in future of the world of things such as Facebook. The site is now incredibly popular, and used by a majority of my friends. We communicate on it (despite my preferring bog standard email) a fair amount. I think that it's actually a great thing, as it allows you to keep in touch with people in a more fluid way that avoids the kind of "I really must write back to them" thing which I always used to have with my French pen-friend.

But where next for the Facebook crowd? I really find it hard to believe that the site will continue for ever, and when the next thing does come along, will we all have to rebuild our networks somewhere else? I had an interesting conversation with Simon "Sixball" Hammond recently, in which he expressed a preference that ideally all this kind of communication took place via a medium which was owned and controlled by yourself. I agree. I'm one of those people who always keeps emails (I have them going back to 1998), and can easily reference a conversation or find out when the last time I emailed someone was. This is one of the reasons why I don't like Facebook - all my messages to people are on someone else's machine somewhere, and I can't get at them easily to archive them. If Facebook went bust, it's all lost to me. With this in mind, I was interested to read this blog post, suggesting that the functionality of Facebook (and I suppose Flickr, LinkedIn and the rest) will eventually mature into open protocols. For the less techy minded, this means that the choice of service provider, or where the data is hosted doesn't matter, rather like email. In other words, choose the photo sharing site you like best, or host your own, and you can still share, communicate and engage with everyone else.

Open protocols are indeed great, but what happens when they become "too" popular, if such a thing exists? As with many other computer-literate folk, I have a loathing for HTML formatted email. I won't get into all the details of it here (I'm sure a search of my contributions from my email address on gmane.org would show up my thoughts on the matter), however I also stumbled upon this blog post today entitled "Email Is Not A Platform For Design". The author provides a rather different take on the usual argument about the use of what is one of the internet's most mature protocols.

So, is the future of all our favourite Web 2.0 start-ups indeed a convergence into open protocols? I certainly hope so. And if so, will they be used as intended? Furthermore, in an open and organic online world does it matter?

Last weekend, having the first sunny Saturday in quite a long time here, we decided to get out into the garden and try to make something of the place. The first task was to move the shed. Though it is very useful, it was right in the middle of the garden, and occupying prime growing-stuff ground. Sheds however, are somewhat heavy, to say the least, and the job wasn't easy.

To cut a long story short, after a good three hours, we'd moved it to the raised bit at the back of the garden with only a small amount of damage taken to the shed. Our arms, on the other hand, are a different story.

The impetus for this was our desire to have a go at growing our own vegetables. I know, before anyone says anything that it's already late in the season to be planting things, but we only moved in a few weeks ago, and didn't want to wait until next year to get started. Besides, I'm reliably informed that certain crops can be grown well into the season. This largely informed our final choice: rocket, radishes and runner beans. Yum.

Well, it's now only five days later and the rocket and radishes have sprung already! This is going to be fun...