It’s been a few weeks since I completed the Mazda London Triathlon now (took a week’s holiday immediately after, and have been desperately trying to catch up with email since then!).
Overall, it was a fantastic day. Superbly organised considering the massive volume of people and equipment being handled over the weekend. My start time was 4pm on the Saturday and despite only having picked up my Orca S3 wetsuit from the fantastic Wiggle.co.uk 2 weeks before – and hence only having practiced in it a couple of times, I felt relatively relaxed. Training had been going well, with only a few niggles in knees and ankles here and there.
First up was the 750m swim. It was always going to be my strongest area having swum competitively when I was younger. The water was murky, but not too cold and at the start there was a lot of hands and feet thrashing around and hitting (all accidental I’m sure). Though having spent a few years playing waterpolo too, I was used to that. Out of my wave of around 450 people, I climbed out of the water in 16th position, feeling quite comfortable.
The 20Km cycle went ok too. The ground was a little damp from the earlier rain, but it didn’t seem to slippy. However, I did see one guy at a roundabout who’d obviously mis-judged a corner and was sitting with the St Johns Ambulance crew having a very bloody face attended to. Towards the end I could feel my calves starting to cramp unfortunately.
The 5Km run was where I expected to fall behind, and so I did. I felt tired but soldiered on with the cheers and encouragement of friends and family. Also, the guys from the Army who were marshalling people around were great with their shouts of support too.

Thanks to everyone who sponsored me and raised valuable money for Keech Hospice Care

I put together a short video with photos and video clips (jerkily shot by my 8 year old daughter Scarlett).

OK, so it’s only 4 weeks now and I’m as ready as I can be. 7th August seems to have come around incredibly quickly but I’ve been training hard (well, quite hard) and working on not making a complete fool of myself. Now though, I’m quite looking forward to it.

I’ve realised that during this process that watching YouTube videos of the Elite competitors in order to improve my transitions, is not going to help me a jot. Mainly because they are running to collect their bikes and changing shoes in nano-seconds, while I fear I will be gasping for breath, vomiting and trying not to die.

If anyone would like to sponsor me, I’m raising money for Keech Hospice – a great charity

I’ll let you know how it goes !

The World Cup is almost upon us and the nerves are starting to jangle already. We all know that England’s chances are slim but we can dream a while until penalties start. It should be interesting to see how the country reacts to our successes and failures. The press will obviously idolise the team when things go well, and slaughter them when they don’t, but I guess we should be used to that by now. The best bet is probably to ignore the papers and just enjoy the games

There’s little chance you’ll get hold of us on Wednesday 23rd at 3pm (England v Slovenia), but you can try.

I’ve also found a useful Outlook .ics file containing all the matches, which can be imported directly into your Outlook calendar. I can’t make any warranty with regards the accuracy or even that it won’t make your machine explode, but everything seems good so far.

Right click here and save the file to your pc. Open Outlook (works in 2003 for me). Click File > Import and Export > Import an iCalendar or vCalendar file. Click Next and locate the saved file. Click OK – job done!

Good luck England!

The A4U get together was hosted at the fantastic Ogilvy offices at 10 Cabot Square last night. It’s always good to meet up with old friends, and make some new acquaintances. It was certainly interesting to see how many people we had helped with moves in the industry, both as candidates and clients.
The general mood was definitely a positive one, with most people reporting a much improved beginning to the year, over what was overall a fairly tough 2009. However, it seems the industry weathered the storm of the last 12 months better than most.
I’ve been very poor at updating the blog over the past couple of months and this post is equally short unfortunately. It’s a good sign though – it means that we’re busy recruiting!

A4U meet at Ogilvy

The lane near my flat

hope this works

As you may know, I also publish a number of Affiliate Marketing websites too. The original intention was to ensure that I maintained up-to-date knowledge of the industry, as it requires a reasonable understanding of PPC and SEO too (and affiliate Marketing of course). This enables us to work closer with our clients on the online marketing jobs which we specialise in.
While I can build sites by hand in HTML I’ve found, like many others that the Wordpress platform offers an excellent and highly customisable platform to work with.

Anyway, I’m in the process of populating my latest site with products, and it made it’s first sale yesterday (via Amazon). It’s always a huge sigh of relief when it works – knowing that you haven’t been wasting your time for the past week!
It’s always interesting with Amazon too – seeing how many other associates sales you make alongside the original purchase. It really does convert very well, and those added bonuses make it really worthwhile.

Today,  myself and few colleagues have tried to contact 3 companies via the telephone.  In each instance, the telephone numbers were taken from the website.  Two companies just did not answer, and the other allocated the main number as their fax number. I know what you’re thinking now.. and I can assure you I did not read it wrong, I double checked and rang again.

I think this is poor service from huge techno companies. I just makes me think they’re rubbish. If something so simple is so difficult, I can only imagine what horror might await if something goes wrong with my eventual purchases with these companies..

Last Friday saw the Buy.at 5-a-side football tournament. Held at the incredible David Beckham Academy, it was a well organised and fun day for all involved. Personally, I’d like to say a huge thank you to Neil McDermott from Venturian Media for letting me join their team. Thanks also to Buy.at for hosting a superb event. We didn’t win, but did at least beat one of the Buy.at host teams.
After the football, a group of us headed to the O2 for evening refreshment. While the lure of going in to see Cliff Richard was tempting, I think we all managed to resist joining the blue-rinse brigade.

Here’s a few shots from the day. Sorry I couldn’t get more but I was either busy playing, or desperately trying to catch breath for the next game.

Although not on the 2 levels at Olympia like 2 years ago, Ad:Tech this year was busy, busy, busy. We arrived mid-morning, and already the hall was packed out.

We met up with clients old and new, and most gave a very definite indication that business has been improving dramatically over the past few months. Online marketing jobs are getting more focus and headcount approval is happening again.

Client servicing roles seem to be increasing greatest, with companies making sure that as well as winning new business, they hold on to existing customers too. There’s still a big focus on the more technical side too – from development to hands-on campaign management.

A good day, despite the poor coffee.

For a bit of fun, my daughter and I made a video last weekend. She wanted to do a magic trick and we came up with this.
It was great fun to make and we welcome all suggestion on how we did it!

Magic Shoes from Daniel Goodchild on Vimeo.