Nildram = Shit

I have been using Nildram as my ISP since I moved to my own house, previously I used Zen who were fantastic but had introduced a more strict usage limit for new customers. I decided to go with Nildram because they had no usage limit outside of peak hours. Yet in reality I have downloaded nowhere near any limit in an entire month anyway.

Since June I was over billed for 3 months for a static IP, after several complaints I finally got refunded. Then they said I hadn't paid for the static IP in June yet they had over billed me for it for the 3 months following.

It appeared I had finally sorted out all the billing but then from last Friday I kept having intermittent problems accessing websites. I would eventually be sent to: http://194.74.65.98/index.html
This makes it sound like a BT problem but I never had the time to investigate further. This has kept happening intermittently ever since. I started to think it could be a problem with the DNS servers when the fault arose again tonight, yet my FTP download continued to work. I rang Customer Support who told me to write in the IP addresses of the DNS servers to my router rather than obtaining them automatically. I did this but the problem persisted. I decided to have a look on ADLS Guide at the ISP forums and in the Nildram one there were several people complaining about the same problem.

I decided to use OpenDNS servers instead and so far have no more problems and websites appear to be loading more quickly too.

If I have any more problems I am moving back to Zen.

House Prices

While mentioning useful sites I guess I should mention Net House Prices, it's an excellent site that I've used for over a year now. It shows every house that has been sold in the country and the prices they were sold for since 2000. Interesting to see how prices have changed and how much people have paid for their houses.

Planning Applications

I just found a site that lists Planning Applications for the entire country. I have always wondered why there wasn't an easy way to find planning applications on the internet. I guess there now is.

The site is Planning Portal which is a government related site but I hadn't heard of it before and I have looked for this sort of thing in the past. you have to click through a few links which eventually take you to the search here.

It lets you search the whole country for planning applications, there is up to a 3 week delay before they appear but more chance of finding them here than through the normal process.

New Live Chat & Meebo

I have been using Meebo for a while. It's a website that lets you login to all your IM clients from anywhere and all from the website. Excellent when away from your normal desktop but still want to be able to chat.

They have just added a new feature which allows you to add a chat feature to a website. On the right of this site is a chat feature and if I'm online at Meebo you can chat live with me :-)