Apologies up front, unless you work on the GIS business this post is a bit of an in-joke . If you DO work in the GIS business I suspect at the very least this could raise a smile unless you are prudish…zzzz.   This is a real book you can buy from Amazon and is getting rave reviews… just ordered mine… 

Once in a while I find Google shares some of Microsoft’s qualities in as much they have some good stuff but don’t shout about it (or if they do shout about I’m mixing in the wrong circles?).

Being a radio ham I’m disturbingly obsessed with how far radio signals travel, especially at VHF and UHF, so anything that makes it easy for me to easily calculate a straight line from A to B is a must-have.

Google maps has a brill distance measuring tool which you’ll find under My Maps<>Measuring tool and hey, it’s easy-peasy to use.  As you might expect from our far out friends in Mountain View there’s an I’m feeling Geeky button button that gives you some whacky alternatives to metric and imperial measurements.

(No doubt my GIS chums will just go tut-tut and say .. “surely you know the measuring tool was there?”.. but hey I found it by accident..)

The dearest and I did the crazy stunt last year where you flog the gaff, put all the loot in the Bank(s) , then use the interest to rent somewhere ‘well posh’ until you find the bestest ever place to live.  Of course this also turned us into a ‘cash buyer with clout’  just like the programs on the telly tell you to do.

So we picked a good and a bad time to do this;

Good ‘cos house prices are still falling meaning our equity is rising;

bad ‘cos the interest rates are complete shite, not to mention the UK banking industry does not exactly inspire confidence if you are a saver.

That aside we have been trawling through rightmove most days and it’s a bit of a fag.  I’ve seen various posts where folks have complained that rightmove doesn’t support RSS, but then, by chance I discovered it DOES support RSS although I’m not sure how recent RSS has become a feature of rightmove.

So now you can set up your search criteria such as price range, location, property type etc. and receive a daily dose of new properties hitting the market at your favourite newsreader (in my case googlereader) , sweet..

(Now if only they could sort out their postcode matching so that searches are accurate to say within a mile or so….sigh)