They're not actually my ISP. I connect to the net via blueyonder cable services, which is very fast, but their tech support appears to consist of a guy hopping around in the server room waving a stick with a chicken tied to the end chanting 'please work' over and over. (I said almost exactly those words to their support manager, which reduced him to helpless laughter for several minutes. I think it cut a little close to home )

The hosting company the pcats website is on is run by some friends of mine, who normally offer a good and reliable service. They don't block the australia area because they think that's where korean spam comes from, they block it because that's where australian hackers come from. Twice in the last year, one particular group of little sods in Australia have rooted the box, and seem to be deliberately targeting several websites on it. So they eventually simply blocked access to the entire area. There are numerous cracking attempts that come regularly from Sydney, Brisbane, etc, even now.

Unfortunately, you're right about mail to the address on the website. It is forwarded through the same machine, so has the same limitations. You can always mail me via an alternative address, such as pca at reality dot demon dot co dot uk.

As far as them being down, though, I'm not sure what the hell is going on there. The machine is up (I can ftp to it), but Apache doesn't appear to be working for some reason. I'm prodding them to sort it out.

pca