Where's Wil?

I've been watching House a lot. Alex bought the first season on DVD just before Christmas, and I've just spend the morning watching the first eight episodes.

It's a great, great show. My only problems with it are a) not screaming "Billy!!!" at Chase, and b) not expecting House to turn around and exclaim "Golly, Blackadder!"

However, it has interested me for one reason in particular - how the show goes about exposing the back stories of the characters. People who know about film and TV will tell you that the premise of a show is not what matters in the show - it's the people. For example, a group of friends having jobs and drinking coffee and being in strange scenarios isn't what makes Friends a great show, it's about the interactions between the characters and their own thoughts. ER isn't a great show because it's set in a hospital - it's a great show because of the mix of characters and the empathy we have with their interactions.

House, on the other hand, reveals its characters in very interesting ways. There are the straight exposition sections, which are very rare - for instance, when Cameron explains to House about her husband, or Chase about his Catholic upbringing. These, as I say, are few and far between.

Then, there are the not-so-covert - Foreman turning in to House is a good example. The director is not too subtle about pointing out the shoes and the mannerisms, and goes almost explicit at the end of the CDC kid episode - these, again, are pretty rare, and so far we've had one for Foreman and one for Cameron, with regards to the babies and her inability to handle bad news.

However, the character that gets the most screen time is, undoubtedly, medical method. Medicine is almost treated like another character in house - we get exposed to its workings and character explicity ("Differential diagnosis", anyone?) as well as through implication and subtlety (The fact that much of it is experience, that House is always right because he has the most experience and understanding, that patients always lie and so can't be trusted to help in diagnosis).

I'm not sure exactly what conclusions I can draw, and I'd need to spend more time understanding and analysing the workings of the show in comparison to other shows to really get someting out of it that I could talk to anyone in a film class about - but I found it interesting, nonetheless. A little more about something.

Thinking about not being at work has gotten me thinking about business. More to the point, my relatives have gotten me thinking about business. Two of my uncles are in the process of starting new businesses, and my experiences in bit-tech are at least slightly relevant.

What has occurred to me is that things in life are really achievable if you just think about them. I mean, everything in life is fundamentally simple if you break it down far enough.

Think of a goal - say, to become a successful actor. To get to that goal, you need to do a few things. First, define the variables - success and actor. Define what you mean by success, then define what you mean by actor. Understand your own understanding of what things things are.

Second, identify the steps and their logical execution. How does one become, first, an actor - and how does one then become successful? History provides many examples, and common threads are not hard to identify.

Lastly, achieving your goal simple becomes a matter of executing on each of the steps - which may certainly require sub-steps. Getting into drama school might be one step you've identified to being a successful actor, but that in itself is a sub-goal which requires breaking down.

Since anything in the world that is physically possible is, in fact, possible, doing whatever you want is simple a case of breaking down the process, identifying the steps and then executing.

This is something I have been trying to get across to my relatives. I think it's helping and, in return, they are helping me understand more about the business arena - a nice little help towards my goal of knowing a little more about lots of things.

(Incidentally, I'm a very structure based person, which is how I came up with this approach. My essays at college were always marked as exceptionally well put together, even if the content was lacking, and I try to apply this logicality to life, too. So far, it's working, and my shortcomings are shortcomings of my own execution, not the method.)

Christmas time is always a period of thoughtfulness and reflection - at least, that's if you don't have kids. I've been using the Christmas break to recharge the batteries and take some time out to sort my head - hence the blogging, since head sorting means slightly more interesting thoughts.

(For those that care, my Christmas present was a Sigma 17-70 camera lens from my parents and a gorgeous cafetiere from Alex).

It occurred to me that it's good to know a little bit about a lot of things. I am someone who enjoys talking to a lot of different people, and having interesting conversations is, at least partly, about having a clue what you're talking about. The more things you know about, the more people you can have interesting discussions with.

The other upside is that the more you know about lots of things, the better you look. Knowing a little bit about a subject - when, chances are, most people know nothing - can make you look very good, and the more little you know, the more chances to look good.

The flipside is that you really have to learn to know when you are talking with someone who knows more about a subject than you. Don't try and use your bit of armchair psychology to really disagree with a phychotherapist - you'll look an idiot.

Despite what I said above, this isn't a vanity thing - it's not about looking good. It's about being able to get the most out of the encounters you have with people, being able to ask interesting questions and advance your knowledge, your own personal development. In a sense, the pursuit of knowledge and the furthering of understanding is, to me at least, critical to the enjoyment of life itself.

So, as one of my new year's resolutions, I'm going to try and learn a little more about a lot of different things. I'll let you know my experiences.

I had the good fortune to go and see Tenacious D play the Hammersmith Apollo last night.

They were totally fucking awesome.

The D put on a fantastic show. Previous performances - I've seen on DVD, bootleg etc - have been all acoustic. This time, they pulled out a bassist, a drummer and a lead electric guitar player styled as the Antichrist and put on a show in a stage themed to resemble Hell. The show was pretty much a tour de force of their first album and the Pick of Destiny soundtrack.

Rage Kage showed some insanely awesome guitar skills, with some solos that were truly unbelievable, whilst Jack Black was his usual extravagant self.

The show was almost two hours, and the encore - consisting of Tribute, **** her Gently and a cover song I didn't recognise saw them bow off the stage to massive, massive applause.

It's fantastic to see two characters completely dominate the stage and entrance an audience for hours, leaving them begging for more. Their charisma came through in the music, and it doesn't hurt that the two leads and the band were incredibly accomplished on their instruments.

All in all, one of the best nights of 2006 for me - long live the D.

I have read many pieces over the last year that attempt to compare the accuracy of Wikipedia with Encyclopaedia Britannica. They usually revolve around articles in the science arena and the number of mistakes / extra facts across the two publications.

One theory that I'm working on is that the two really aren't comparable. What we should be comparing Wikipedia to is the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

In the Douglas Adams book, the Guide is a database of things and places written by a number of reporters across the galaxy. There are so many similarities with Wikipedia that I'm astounded that no one has drawn this comparison before.

For one, The Guide is written by jobbing pundits, many of whom have little expertise in what they're writing about. Many of them are rubbish (Ford Prefect). The Guide has bizarre leanings, with some articles phenomenally in-depth and others completely lacking in detail (Earth's entry consists soley of: "Mostly Harmless.") In fact, the Guide is described by Adams as having "Many omissions and [containing] much that is apocryphal, or at least wildly inaccurate."

Like Wikipedia, The Guide is also frequently compared to the professional publication of the day, the Encryclopaedia Galactica. Adams notes that The Guide is more popular since it is "Slightly cheaper", not to mention the fact it has the words 'Don't Panic' on the cover. Apt in a world of Wikipedia essay plaigiarism?

People comparing Wiki to Britannica miss the point. It is not an encyclopaedia in the traditional sense - it is, in fact, a repository of human knowledge. Could you find an entry for me in Britannica? How about the Final Fantasy series? Yes, Britannica may be slightly more scientific, but what will it tell you about The Repository of the Ancients, the universal bible of Stargate SG-1?

What is interesting to me is that The Guide existed online, pre-Wikipedia, in the form of H2G2, a project started by Adams himself and designed to be the real-world equivalent of the book. Resembling a slightly less flashy Wikipedia, anyone could write an article on anything, then Guide Editors would pick the best stuff to become the 'official' entry for a particular term. I actually wrote the official Guide Entry for Hereford, my home town.

Just as The Guide in the book suffered from infrequent revisions, so does the Guide online - as of now, much of the Hereford article is inaccurate, as nightclubs are renamed and restaurants closed. Wikipedia improves on the model with its method of constant updating, constant revising.

I was chatting with a friend at Google HQ last week, and one of the things we mentioned was that Google Booksearch is a product of the Google age. Before Google was invented, finding a book in a library was all about knowing Dewey Decimal - the most efficient indexing method for the medium. Google arrived, and now we're used to searching the net for small snippets of phrases or key terms. Google is now attempting to retrofit this function to a primarily analogue medium, giving us functionality that - pre Google - we didn't even realise we wanted.

Britannica is great, but if it means I have to go and find a library containing it then spend time browsing through it for an entry that, almost certainly, isn't in there, I'm not bothered.

Give me Wikipedia - 95% of the accuracy (worst case), accessible from anywhere in the world, a far greater range of topics, fully indexed and searchable through the wonders of the post-Google age.

Now if only Wikipedia could help me find my towel...

EDIT: Paul Boutin has an in-depth comparison at Slate. Good stuff.

... It is to compare Apple's often-rumoured iPhone to Paris Hilton.

Have I been reading too much of The Superficial?

It's just gone 7am and I'm on the bus. Blogging, no less, from bus-wide free public WiFi.

Is it just me, or is this awesome? Yes, I know all about 3G and Edge data cards, but the availability of free WiFi on mass transit is something that's just so very cool - and great for frequent travellers like me.

Props, then, to the Oxford Tube for not only giving me net access, but a croissant and orange juice too. Competition - the Tube has been under increased pressure from rail recently, given some appalling roadworks delays - wins out, it seems.

In my bid to stay informed about the tech sector and the myriad of companies, websites and products springing up within it, I'm on the hunt for any good blogs or services that can contribute some news or information of worth. I'm subscribed to all the usuals - TechMeme, TechCrunch, GigaOm, Digg etc etc etc. Anybody got some offthewall suggestions for me that could be useful?

I went to see Jools Holland rock the Albert Hall last night in London. The guys is a seriously talented musician, and getting to see his piano playing up close was a real joy. He put on a fantastic gig, and is a real showman. He was joined for a few songs by Lulu, who looked strangely hot (although my accomplice Alex Watson, of CPC fame, cruelly suggested this was due to the lack of HD cameras trained on her).

No TWiT for me this week, but stay tuned for the latest developments in the bit-tech podcast saga. We've got a mixer, we've got some mics, now we just have to make the software work...