15.10 - Obechi.
"From the creators of the Flash sensation Boomshine comes a devious new game where hand/eye co-ordination and a lightning-quick reaction time spell the difference between success and failure. Hundreds of colorful particles floating in the ether - and it's your job to put them all together. Click and hold down the mouse button to make a ring around the dots, and watch them all gather in the center. With every ring you create you'll get closer and closer to your target... but miss the target, even by one, and the nucleus is ruined. How quickly can you complete all fifteen levels without making a single mistake? The challenge is on..."
Click here to play Obechi!
To all newcomers, welcome and thanks for stopping by - hope you've enjoyed the game! If you're interested in listening to some more of my music, check out the links to the right of the page. Watch this space for some exclusive Obechi spin-off material as well as information on how you can get hold of my next album when it comes out next spring.
13.10 - Where I've been.
Two months ago, I came back from a three week trip in the States and never actually got round to writing about it. This is due to a plethora of excuses, all of which I shall now proceed to explain. Instead of writing about the holiday alone, and given I'm now installed back in Bath embarking upon my final year of studies, I will herein attempt to offload the story of my entire summer so I can get back to making regular updates on here.
We spent the first three days of the trip in Washington DC, where I spent more time focussing on the hugely exciting fact I was actually in the States for the first time rather than appreciating how cool the city is in its own right. The stay included visits to the White House, the Capitol building, the Reflecting Pool, Union Station, the Air and Space Museum, the Lincoln Memorial, the National Mall and the Post Office Pavilion, and probably a lot of other stuff I can't remember the name of. It was all very lovely.
After that, we spent a couple of days in Virginia Beach where I acquired a full-body burn tan which still hasn't actually disappeared yet which probably means I have skin cancer.
Then we proceeded onto Williamsburg Historic Area via the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel and Cape Charles. In a bid to secure ourselves free tickets for Williamsburg, my parents opted into a timeshare presentation scam. With a free breakfast buffet laid on at the start, this was actually a surprisingly pleasant day out until we were wheeled into a cubicle by a short, creepy foreign man in an ill-fitting suit who disclosed few details other than that he "specialized in foreclosures". We took this as the opportunity to bail. Williamsburg itself was a bit rubbish, though the extreme heat and psychotic crowds didn't help matters greatly.
The last few days we spent driving through Richmond, Charlottesville, Monticello, Lexington and on to the Blue Ridge Mountain Parkway. The latter in particular was breathtakingly pretty. I spent most of the drive through the mountains listening to a fragment of a single song I had written just before leaving for the States, which I'll get back to in a second.
Whilst the rest of my family went back to London, I then jetted down to Atlanta to stay with Danny for a week, for both business purposes and to be "shown around". It was an absolutely unforgettable trip. I arrived with no idea what would happen; I left with a contact list of smart and sexy people, a new business partner and a completely new outlook on life. This was the point at which I decided that by this time next year I will not be prolonging my residency in the United Kingdom any further. My country has disappointed me too much. I figure if I don't take this opportunity, I'll spend the rest of my rainy little life wondering what could have been. Not a chance I'm willing to take.
Most disappointing aspect of the trip: considering it necessary to go to McDonalds a total of 7 times. Which (for the record) doesn't even taste as good, an opinion I am confident will cause several metric tonnes of horse manure to mysteriously end up on my driveway in due course.
I returned home and spent the next week and a half writing up sixty pages of reports for my industrial placement year, probably the most stressful, painstaking, needless assignment I have ever had to take on. I squeezed in a quick trip to the Isle of Wight with my parents, my sister and her boyfriend for a few days whilst I was doing these. I also managed to pluck up the courage to place an order (using a large chunk of my net worth) for the one piece of hardware I had been hoping to acquire for most of the year: the Roland AX-Synth keytar. My credit card bounced in the process and required several phonecalls to amend. Even then I was staring down the barrel of a 4-6 week delivery time and was running the risk of not getting it in time before heading back to Bath.
After finishing the placement reports, I went up to Birmingham for a week to stay with my best mate from uni at the beginning of September. The evening I arrived I happened to converse with one of his friends who worked in a music store. We asked him (tongue-in-cheek) whether they stocked an AX-Synth, and to our absolute astonishment he was sitting on a display model and would happily give it to me, retail price. Given that I had no intention of going back to Bath without one, I immediately agreed to purchase it off him and cancelled the order with Dolphin. I promptly handed over the cash and walked away with it. What a beauty. We spent the rest of the week playing a lot of poker, pubbing and clubbing in central Birmingham (finest girls in all of England - this is fact) and watching Shooting Stars.
It is with much pleasure I am proud to announce a new project that is almost due for release: a new game by Danny and me that we hope will go most of the way (if not further) towards emulating Boomshine's success. We are hoping to launch it - a colourful, multi-levelled, 2D hand-eye test! - within the next week or so. The soundtrack and a couple of the gameplay elements are by me. Danny has done an extraordinary job with the game. We have been playtesting it with a handful of willing volunteers for a few weeks now, and we've used their feedback to help shape our ideas. Links will be posted here as soon as the game goes live. Everything we turn over from this game will go straight into the venture as soon as we both graduate next summer.
It has also been an exceptionally long time since I posted any new music, a serious faux pas given that this time next year it will be my life. My genre has completely changed since the release of the first two albums, and it is my aim to finish what I have started of a very promising third album in the springtime (or thereabouts) and release it in as much of a blaze of publicity as is humanly possible. The keytar will, in part, be used almost solely for the purpose of performing the album live. The new songs are very haunting and tell a story I am slowly writing as I go along. In the meantime, I have rebuilt the timhalbert.com jukebox to fetch you random selections of some of my favourite material from the past few years. Click on songs to play them, and click them again to pause them. If you want to keep them for your iPod, please be my guest! Simply right-click on them and choose Save. I'm also adding some new material to the library over the next fortnight that won't be appearing on the album, largely due to it all being either very experimental or having that distinctively 80s cheesy pong about it.
I'll get back to adding a couple of new runs and poems soon too.
Thanks for reading! You're all fantastic.
22.8 - About that holiday write-up, yeah?
I've got to do a lot of placement reports for next week, so I'll get back to you about the holiday in due course, if you don't mind. Thank you! (I would have thought you would have come to expect this sort of unrelenting disappointment by now.)
13.8 - 50 nos and a yes... means yes.
I'm back from a two week road trip around Washington D.C. and Virginia plus a 7-day conference in Atlanta with our good friend Danny Miller.
Full write-up in due course, however I'm unfortunately disappearing into thin air again for 3 more days whilst I take care of some business on the South coast, aye? But do stick around, there will be maps and pictures and amusing anecdotes and everything, you lucky, lucky people, you.
If you're wondering why I'm not running every street in Bath at the moment, that's because I'm not in Bath. Interesting!
In the meantime, thanks for stopping by.
6.5 - Hello everyone!
I've missed you terribly.
I haven't weblogged since, good heavens, exactly 17 months ago. Haven't times changed?
As you're clearly dying to hear more, here are some highlights of my year so far:
· I have learned the bass. After all this time, I realise now I was born to play it. Happy slappy.
· I am currently attempting to run every street in Bath. More on this later. I have new running shoes for the purposes of this exercise. (Get it? Exercise? Get it? You've missed me.)
· I have learned how to play Texas Hold Them properly. It has improved me as a human being.
· I have been in & out of one relationship and I quit for the year.
· I have a round beach blonde mop now instead of that rather unsightly musty brown quiff.
· I'm starting to like cooking, golf and fine wine and am therefore nearly 38.
· I am still, thanks to the untiring efforts of Gordon Broon, a hardened Conservative.
· My phone is broken to the extent that I can't receive messages unless I turn it off and on again after sending just one out. Amazing.
· I'm jetting out to the United States this year to spend a fortnight in Washington and to do a week's business with our very own Dr. Boomshine himself, Danny Miller. This will be the first time either of us have met. Him included. This despite the pair of us being INTERNET SUPERSTARS. Imagine!
· My hex is now #800020.
That's all for now! Tune in next time to hear some more fascinating tales of geekery and ineptitude from your favourite demi-Australian.
4.5 - A feeble explanation.
Right!
I cannot emphasise enough how regretful I am this incarnation of the site took so long to roll out. Considerably so. The Most Reliable Guide to the Universe, whilst certainly proving itself to be most reliable, was not the be-all-and-end-all redesign I had hoped it would be, and after two updates I was already bored of it. I had a lot more to write but I just couldn't bring myself to write it. After what has now been well over five and a half years captaining this vessel, I've learned a very intriguing lesson: interests and hobbies change faster than I can build websites to suit them. Just because at one moment in time I happen not to be working on any major music/audio-related projects does not mean I instead wish to feel tied down to regularly updating a deeply cynical weblog (though as a fallback you can never write it off). The same applies vice versa. As such, what you see here basically enables me to cover anything and everything to suit my whimsical mood. Chew on that.
Do you like my new Flash player? If so, why not write me an e-mail to let me hear all about it? I would let you leave a comment in a cutesy little box at this point, but you know how it is. No? Okay.
It's amusing to watch everyone on Lostpedia running around like headless chickens amending articles to try to deal with the S6 plot turn. 
