Here’s a few photos we took just after moving to the new Mighty Ape HQ. Thanks, @MightyApe.

Mighty Ape offices

Mighty Ape warehouse

Mighty Ape warehouse, vertigo edition

More photos to come once we’re a bit more settled!

More of Mighty Ape‘s master plan has fallen in to place this week, with the move into our new office building and warehouse.

The big goals of the move are to allow us to hold a lot more stock so we can provide fast service on a wider range of stuff; to (of course) increase our orders-per-day shipping capacity; and to generally make the business a more professional and integrated environment for everyone involved.

The new location has over five times the warehouse space and over three times the office space of our old building, and for the first time we’re actually rivalling our suppliers for physical presence. It definitely feels much more “officey” (board room, anyone?) and it’s going to be a great environment for Mighty Ape to continue to grow.

The warehouse is a real hive of activity with people everywhere picking and packing orders, receiving stock, tidying the resulting mess etc… so it’s really nice to have so much more space for everyone to work in. Having the vertical space (and forklift) to store rarely-used stuff up high with ease is very cool, too, as is receiving palette-loads of goods with ease (Beatles Rock Band got our forklift off to a flying start).

It hasn’t all gone smooth, though. Two days into the move and we’re still shipping orders via a combination of iPhone 3G tethering and remote order processing. TelstraClear doesn’t seem to have the same definition of “urgent” as we do.

OK, it’s been a while between posts. Here’s a quick round up of some of the stuff I’ve been reading/playing over the last few months.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen

This is a truly epic fantasy series from Steven Erikson; I’ve been reading it for months and I’m only on the third book! Seriously seriously brilliant stuff though.

• Book 1: Gardens of the Moon
• Book 2: Deadhouse Gates
• Book 3: Memories of Ice

I’ve got another five books to go after those, and two more releasing in the future. (On that note, I’m still waiting for George R.R. Martin to finish Dance with Dragons…)

Fight Night Round 4 ~ Xbox 360

A worthy purchase but not without problems, Fight Night 4 is a lot of fun for the most part but becomes a little frustrating due to the too-challenging training mini-games which eventually result in your undefeated boxer being worse on-paper than your opponents. It’s still possible to win at this point, but you have to fight conservatively since it’s too difficult to knock the other guy out.

Born to Run ~ Chris McDougall

This is a really interesting read even if you’re not into running, although you will appreciate it more if you are. The majority of the story revolves around the Tarahumara, a near-forgotten Mexican tribe who, despite their isolation, live in a way that makes them world-class endurance runners.

Tales of Vesperia ~ Xbox 360

Felt like playing an RPG so picked this up recently, along with Eternal Sonata (which I haven’t played yet). I’m only a few hours into Vesperia, so it’s really still in RPG-introduction mode, but it seems decent enough so far.

Various cycling & running books

I’ve been doing a lot of cycling and running this year so have actively taken even more of an interest in learning about things like technique, physiology and nutrition than ever before. Here’s some of the better books I’ve been referring to:

• The Runner’s Body presented by Runner’s World
• The Cyclist’s Training Bible by Joe Friel
• The Triathlete’s Training Bible by Joe Friel
• The Lance Armstrong Performance Program by Chris Carmichael & Lance Armstrong

I thought this was a really interesting take on a declining share market:

Stocks are crashing, so you turn on the television to catch the latest market news. But instead of CNBC or CNN, imagine that you can tune into the Benjamin Graham Financial Network. On BGFN, the audio doesn’t capture that famous sour clang of the market’s closing bell; the video doesn’t home in on brokers scurrying across the floor of the stock exchange like angry rodents. Nor does BGFN run any footage of investors gasping on frozen sidewalks as red arrows whiz overhead on electronic stock tickers.

Instead, the image that fills your TV screen is the facade of the New York Stock Exchange, festooned with a huge banner reading: “SALE! 50% OFF!” As intro music, Bachman-Turner Overdrive can be heard blaring a few bars of their old barnburner, “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.” Then the anchorman announces brightly, “Stocks became more attractive yet again today, as the Dow dropped another 2.5% on heavy volume – the fourth day in a row that stocks have gotten cheaper. Tech investors fared even better, as leading companies like Microsoft lost nearly 5% on the day, making them even more affordable. That comes on top of the good news of the past year, in which stocks have already lost 50%, putting them at bargain levels not seen in years. And some prominent analysts are optimistic that prices may drop still further in the weeks and months to come.”

The newscast cuts over to market strategist Ignatz Anderson of the Wall Street firm of Ketchum & Skinner, who says, “My forecast is for stocks to lose another 15% by June. I’m cautiously optimistic that if everything goes well, stocks could lose 25%, maybe more.”

“Let’s hope Ignatz Anderson is right,” the anchor says cheerily. “Falling stock prices would be fabulous news for any investor with a very long horizon. And now over to Wally Wood for our exclusive AccuWeather forecast.”

Taken from The Intelligent Investor revised edition, by Benjamin Graham with added commentary by Jason Zweig.

For a long time I had written Twitter off as a pointless concept, designed to allow people with nothing better to do to express themselves with boring phrases such as “I am going to bed now” and “I’m watching TV”.

Chris and I got talking about Twitter a couple of weeks ago for some reason or another and I decided I’d register to see if I would use it.

I gained a new appreciation quite quickly once I realised that Twitter is, more or less, an abbreviated blog.

For someone that doesn’t have a desire to dedicate too much time to writing, Twitter is a great compliment to this blog. I can post summarised random thoughts (hoping that they are interesting) that I would never usually bother to write about in full because the effort required by me exceeds the reward to the reader.

So, follow me on Twitter – you’ll find that I’m alive after all.