Those are brave men. Let's go kill them.

As someone who likes to spend the majority of his free time in front of a television consuming television and playing video games, I've had a surprisingly active couple weekends. Last week was the epic warehouse move of doom at work, in which we had to pack all the whisky in the known universe into vans and relocate them to a larger facility. This resulted in me and many other vigilant "volunteers" spending most of Friday and all of Saturday carrying a metric shit tone (an officially recognised weight) of whisky of vans and onto shelves.

It wasn't all bad though, there were some laughs to be had as the professionality of the operation fell the more tired we became. Below is one of my favourite images from when myself and Mike (pictured) had to move a packing table across the building. It would have required four people to carry it, so we came up with a more creative solution that I could move single handed.

Having recovered from that fake weekend, yesterday was West Hill Karate's twelve hour sponsored bag session to raise money for St. Michael's Hospice. It's not as bad as it sounds, I didn't actually have to hit a bag for twelve hours. Instead there was a single punching bag that had to be hit for the twelve hour period, with people taking fifteen minute shifts. I showed up for the last three and a half hours of the event, hit the bag for thirty minutes and held it for forty five minutes. It was a lot of fun, although I did make quite a mess of my hands. Its not like my career depends on them or anything fortunately.

Of course all this frolicking in the wilderness hasn't stopped me doing some loafing. The folk at work got me into watching Breaking Bad recently. I'm two episodes into season two and absolutely blown away by how incredible it is. So far every episode has been greater than the last and from what I've been told it just gets better and better. It's shocking how methodical, drawn out and realistic the show is and I'm pretty surprised someone hasn't tried to cancel it yet. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't heard of it.

The last TV series I really got into was Game of Thrones. After the season finished I really wanted to check out the book series it's based on as I'm a fairly impatient guy, but gave up on both the ebook and the audiobook. I dumped the ebook due to fear of eye strain (I look at screens for most of the day and didn't want to add additional reading) and quit the audiobook pretty quickly because the person reading it is simply god awful. For my birthday I got the physical books which seems to have stuck, as I'm almost half way through the first tome. It certainly feels good in this modern day to read a good old fasion book. Whoda'thunk it huh?

Finally in video games, I've been on an old school Zelda kick in anticipation of the new game. I completed the original NES Zelda for the first time about a month ago and I'm a couple dungeons away from the ending of Ocarina of Time, which I've also never completed. I'm a terrible Zelda fan I guess, but I'm trying to correct that. On the more modern side of things I've been playing Gears of War 3, which is a fantastic co-op experience. I played the entire campaign with three other University / Karate chums and it was a blast. The game is a pretty evolutionary upgrade from Gears 2, but simply playing that game with four people is such a fun experience. We also completed an epic fifty waves of horde together and yesterday did all twelve waves of beast mode on insane. It's great stuff indeed.

Winter is coming.

A couple posts ago I mentioned that this blog was getting a lot of referrers from folks trying to find out how to do some stuff I mentioned in my final year project and that I might write a couple blog posts explaining what I learned. I am in no way an expert on the subject, but with any luck what I contribute will at least point people in the right direction.

Rather than write a lengthy post however, I decided to produce a video using the newly released Final Cut Pro X. A lot of professional video editors are complaining that the software has lost a lot of features and has changes they disagree with, and I'm sure they are right, but as a casual video editor who was relegated to using iMovie (which didn't do enough) because I didn't understand the complexities of Final Cut Express, I love the power and freedom the new editing software has given me. The new price also did a lot to sell me on the purchase.

So here it is, my first stab at a video tutorial; a guide to creating a simple iPhone application that displays a UITableViewController using Core Data as the data source. This is my first attempt, so I'm sure there are improvements to be made. If folk like it, maybe I will do more. Or perhaps I will make a video on something completely different. Who knows.

In other news, I watched the complete first season of Game of Thrones, which was absolutely incredible. Its certainly up there with one of my favourite TV shows, and even got me back into reading books, as I can't wait an entire year for the next season to arrive. I would recommend the book(s) and the show to anyone who isn't squeamish about a little blood and unnecessary nudity and sex.