Goodchild Smith

The Grand National too

dgoodchild — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 08:22:20 +0000

Following straight on from one gambling post, another win!
£10 each way on Neptune Collanges at 33/1 – £432 in the bag plus £12 back for starting a new account at William Hill via Quidco.

Poker

dgoodchild — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 08:14:45 +0000

As some may know, I’m an avid poker player. So, I’d just like to crow about my win last night!

Big tournament at the Grosvenor Casino in Luton, £50+£6 buy-in and around 60 runners. I wasn’t planning to go, but a friend was going and asked if I’d like to join him. With nothing better planned, I tagged along. We started at 4pm and things were pretty level for the first few hours. My friend crashed out early unfortunately. I didn’t get out of there ’til 2am but it was worth it for first place and winnings of just over £1K. Happy days!

Where’s the 419?

dgoodchild — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 11:41:30 +0000

Why don’t I get 419 scam mails any more? Didn’t we all used to receive at least 1 a week? I know I certainly did. I even remember my first, when I actually read through it all, pondering the possibilities of helping someone retrieve $40 million.
I was only reminded of this when I actually received one today. Not from Nigeria, but from someone claiming to be in London. I particularly liked his sign off -
“Please if you are not willing and interested in helping me kindly delete this email from your email and pretend you never got it.”
I will do that Sir!

Google Chat no more?

dgoodchild — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 11:41:10 +0000

Over the past few years, we’ve utilised the Google Chat badge on our website. It’s always been handy for people to contact us – perhaps if they are at work and unable to speak on the phone. A useful little tool, relatively easy to implement and a nice feature to have.
It stopped working recently (or just repeated queries back at the user!) and it’s been quite tricky trying to figure out why. One person on a Google Group suggested that Google were no longer developing the badges, and they should be removed. We can’t find out if this is official and the page to generate the code still appears to be up. Go figure.

Anyway it’s all banjaxed, so we’ve shifted over to the Windows Live equivalent. Fingers crossed.

What’s up 3?

dgoodchild — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:29:01 +0000

I’m in the process of upgrading my phone. After a bit of a run around with misinformation about a change of contract ownership issue, they’ve finally announced that I can upgrade.
However, while my contract ends at the end of April (and they always give a month’s grace) they want to charge me £19 for the pleasure. So, what you’re telling me Three, is that while I want to sign a new 2 year contract with you, you want to charge me another £19? A contract which will make you nearly £800 and you still want to charge me £19.
Instead, you lose a customer. I’ll wait. Perhaps instead of the Samsung Galaxy S2, the S3 may be out soon anyway.

Google on the up! Who’d've thought it?

dgoodchild — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 16:58:44 +0000

http://searchengineland.com/bing-and-google-gain-market-share-while-yahoo-drops-114140?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed-main

I’m not sure this is surprising news to anyone, but there it is anyway. Google and Bing increase their market share while everyone else declines. In other news Big Ben continues to chime. It’s only really going to be news if it changes.
I think what’s interesting is the mobile search stats. It’s not just Google with 66%, it’s Google with 95-96% of market share. Where’s everyone else? Picking up crumbs. Who’s going to find a way to topple them? Someone with something innovative I presume.
I wish I knew what it was of course. I feel like the scarecrow in Wizard of Oz sometimes. Perhaps the Wizard could give me a brain for inspired mobile search technology?

Revival of the blog

dgoodchild — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:54:50 +0000

It’s been too long old friend, and we shouldn’t be strangers any longer. Blog, I’m here to address our issues and start writing to you again.
We’ve seen an insanely busy 18 months here at Goodchild Smith. Online Marketing recruitment has gone from strength to strength in that time. While 2009 looked decidedly poor, we’ve seen a gradual to a phenomenal rise in activity all round. Clients are not only providing us with new roles, but they also have sign-off to hire (something which wasn’t always the case 2 years ago) and are proceeding with interviews and making decisions promptly. This can only be down to the success they are enjoying with their own volumes of business.
PPC jobs are coming through, both agency-side and client-side, Affiliate Marketing jobs are maintaining their levels but we’ve seen an interesting rise in Analytics jobs. There does seem to be much more focus from everyone on extracting the most data from the work they are doing and optimising campaigns accordingly.
This is good news for everyone. Even though Online Marketing spend is constantly on the increase, less money spent poorly / inappropriately is good for the client, good for the agency and ultimately good for the industry as a whole.

London Triathlon

dgoodchild — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 10:38:59 +0000

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).

London Triathlon

dgoodchild — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 12:48:15 +0000

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 !

World Cup

dgoodchild — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 11:38:22 +0000

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!