Charles on… anything that comes along

Simply perfect: the name of the British Medical Association’s spokesman on hospital hygiene is… Dr Paul Grime.

Honestly.

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I’ve been meaning to write this one up for ages. Anyway, here it is.

You hear a single on the radio, the first one off a new album (probably by an artist you’ve not heard or heard of), and think “Wow! That’s fantastic! This band is incredible! Must get the album!”

You get to the shop (real or online) and there’s the album, all cute, and it’s got that single on.

Now pause. Here’s the Golden Rule:

If the first single is the first track, the album is a dud.

The corollary: if the first single is not the first track, the album is great.

Few albums have broken this rule. Off the top of my head: Nirvana’s Nevermind. Garbage’s first album. Umm.. sure you’ll have some more. In general, though, it’s a rock. There are zillions more confirming examples than confounding ones.

This is why I’ve held back from getting Gwen Stefani’s Love Angel Music Baby. The first single (”What You Waiting For”) is a storming track, but it’s the first in the track listing. The second single (”Rich Girl”) was the second track, and was very so-so. The third track is the third single and sounds OK.

But in general, that’s how this works.

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• Best and worst value on the iTunes Music Store (3 August 2004; score: 51.84%)
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Hmm, it seems Winn Schwartau has switched “his company” from Windows machine(s) to Apple’s Macs. He did this because, he says, “I am coming to subscribe to the view that indeed, the WinTel hegemony is a threat to the national economic security of any organization or nation-state that relies up it.” (I think he means on it, but anyhow.)

There’s a longer, more detailed version at Network World. In that, he comments:

I want my computer to function every time I turn it on. I want my computer to not corrupt data when it does crash. I use a handful of applications: Microsoft Office, e-mail, browser, FTP client and some multimedia toys. Regardless of format, they should work without crashing.

I live on the ‘Net. I do not want my browser to eat up all of my memory. In the WinTel world I need an assortment of third-party tools to try to keep my PC alive. That’s just crazy.

Mm. Paul Thurrott has some vague rebuttals, though none to the last point there, about needing the third-party tools to keep the PC alive (antispyware, antivirus, anyone?). And it’s really not true to say that Mac OSX is “aimed at technical users”. That’s really untrue. In fact, Apple has an interesting new introduction to using its modern Macs, called Mac 101, which is a nicely-pitched explanation of the system for novice users who don’t need, or want, ever to crack a bash shell.

Though I can tell Winn - who I’m pretty sure I’ve met, but can’t remember whether he’s the one with the reasonable outlook on computer security, or the overblown one - that changing to the Mac isn’t going necessarily to mean he’ll avoid memory-gobbling browsers. And I have known apps to crash.

Still, most things go very well. My wife’s iBook is now on an uptime (ie time since last reboot) of about 90 days. I think you could call that stability.

(Endnote: you can bet that this article of Schwartau’s will be one of the most-linked-to on the Net within a matter of hours. Network World will be delighted.)

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