Thanks Everyone
Posted by David WhitehouseAs many of you know I recently got married, I just wanted to give a big shout out and thanks to everyone that came along, for all the kind words and gifts.
I also wanted to just thank a few of the people who helped make it special.
- Discerning Images, the photographer from York – Rob did a spectacular job and was very easy to get on with.
- Also if you are looking for a wedding venue, I highly recommend The Old Deanery in Ripon as a wedding venue in North Yorkshire – I hardly had to worry about anything the whole day! Their wedding organiser, Simone, did a great job!
- Also thanks to Rob Hutchinson from BGN events, who provided the disco – sadly it was good weather and a lot of people spent the time outside!
Cheers to everyone for making it the perfect day for Montarat and I.
Update: Wedding Photos
If you would like to see the wedding photos and order any prints, then please check out the photo album here, username is david, pw is david.
My Father, Peter Whitehouse
Posted by David WhitehouseI don’t often mention my father, but I happen to be very proud of him, he’s probably the reason why I am so obsessed with owning my own business one day! He (and my mum and their business partners) built up a large business with offices across Europe, the company renamed from Express Terminals to Express Group in 2006, I happened to be working there during the re-brand. He’s retired now (kinda), but I found this the other day, and I just thought it was worth sharing. It really is a reminder of how fast technology changes and how quickly you can get things moving if you put your mind to something.
In case you can’t read it, it says:
Making that break…
Computer engineer Peter Whitehouse has swapped his daily car drive across the Pennines for a morning jog and a brisk walk to work.
Peter, 42, grew tired of commuting daily between his home in Ripon and his work place in Salford – a 160 mile round trip.
He’d also had a burning ambition to run his own business. So with a little help from his friends – and his wife Linda – he launched Express Terminals in the North Yorkshire town a year ago with £5,000 and a second hand Volvo.
Now he’s at work within minutes – to a business of his own which has netter a first year turnover of £300,000 with a £1m target for next year.
The computer printer repair company now employs five engineers an administrative clerk and intends to take on more staff this year.
Robin Hood, The Biggest Let Down of 2010
Posted by David WhitehouseWhat a disappointment. Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe completely raped and pillaged this classic old English Tale.
So, where to start…
Some French dudes come across the channel and destroy Barnsdale, then York, Darlington and Peterborough – on their way to Nottingham?! They’ve only got 200 men, but that is plenty enough to sack York.
So Robin Hood gets in his first proper fight in Nottingham, being a superb bowman, Robin decides to go for the sword – low and behold he’s a natural! Obviously he was being modest at the start of the film where he was storming a castle and avoiding hand to hand combat.
The rest of the film is pretty much the same, they beat the French in Nottingham and then travel down to Dover as the French are landing, it appears that they got their inspiration from 1066 here. Basically the whole of the French army is coming, and if 200 was enough to sack York, then they are proper fucked now, there is a whole 500 of them here to sack London! But don’t worry, the enitre English army is there to meet them, and there is at least 100 of them!
His pretend wife shows up to fight alongside him (she’s not had any experience at fighting as far as I can tell). Robin Hood being an honorable man that will protect his woman at all costs naturally let’s her fight with him, low and behold the main bad guy gets a hold of her and Robin has to save her life (who’d have seen that coming).
Finally at the end of the film Robin shoots his 5th arrow(?) and kills the bad guy, before being outlawed by the king for stirring up unrest.
Hence begins the story of Robin Hood.
What a load of bollocks! Go see Iron Man 2 instead, its awesome, and more realistic.
Is the SEO industry becoming more competitive?
Posted by David WhitehouseLike any market, there comes a point where saturation is reached, this is the peak of the product life cycle:
Image courtesy of Wikimedia
Now we can compare this to a graph of people looking for SEO services in the UK, and it would seem to me that we are most likely in the maturity area.
I’ve also noticed things get more and more competitive in the SERPS recently, with local search being increasingly targeted by SEO’s. For instance I’ve seen 3 new domains this year that have been created purely to target local SEO search volumes: seospecialistbirmingham.co.uk (damn him he knocked me down to #5 for SEO specialist, fair play though), seoyorkshire.org.uk (which I believe was started earlier this year and knocked Dave Naylor down to #2 for “SEO Yorkshire”) and finally the new kid on the block, seoleeds.org (which was created by Branded3 and appears to have been registered in the past week and is obviously targeting SEO Leeds).
So things are really hotting up! Everything is becoming much more competitive, and it’s going to become increasingly time consuming and expensive to rank for SEO terms whilst also trying to work on current clients.
Combine this with the fact that doing freelance SEO (i.e. not for an agency) is becoming increasingly time consuming and competitive, (Patrick Altoft has recently commented on this also with his post on SEO Freelancers) and I think we are going to see a lot of freelancers die off. Instead the SEO agencies that perform are going to grow and as a result the reputation of the industry will improve, a lot – which is certainly what we need right now!
Getting my knee sorted
Posted by David WhitehouseI’ve been having problems with my knee for almost 4 years now, I spent 1 year trying to continue karate on it, but in the end I had to stop because the pain was too bad and it really felt like I was doing my knee some damage – plus all the stories of people at karate getting hip or knee replacements kind of worried me!
Anyways, during that time I have been to the doctors twice, the first time was just after I injured it, they told me they’d book me a physio appointment and I waited quite a few months before realising that they hadn’t bothered at all. So I decided to go private, I was given a load of exercises, none of which appeared to help, by this time it had been a year. Then I saw another physiotherapist about it around 2 years ago, again more exercises, again no change. Then I saw another physio late in 2009, more exercises and again no change.
So not wanting to give up I saw the doctors again, he suggested I tried strengthening my quads – yeah cheers doc, like I hadn’t tried that one before!
So again, not wanting to give up, I contacted Andy Wray, a local physiotherapist in Ripon who has only recently gone private full time. So I saw Andy, and he went through the usual tests and checks – and nothing really seemed apparent, until I let out a big girly scream and he suggested I might have a “lunge lesion” – as the pain sounded like it was bone on bone.
So Andy wrote a letter and I took it to the doctors and now I am finally seeing an orthopaedic surgeon, so hopefully they’ll get it all sorted and I can get back to a martial art, WOOHOO!!!
Cheers Andy.
New USB Soundcard for Improved Voice Recognition – FAIL
Posted by David Whitehousewell I’ve got and naturally speaking 9.5 and I produced for a USB soundcard basically it’s meant to improve the quality of the audio because instead of using inbuilt soundcard them using an external on the advantage being that you don’t hear all the worrying stuff coming from the computer so it can get a better sound quality I am also ordered Dragon naturally speaking 10 some hoping to start blogging them using this
anyway I didn’t really correct this you can see how good it is and also by just both her and normal conversational speed so wasn’t like that they’re dictating slowly I was just talking about would normally
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