The first day of MacWorld Expo, and once again I'm not planning on attending. Somewhere along the line I got my fill of vendor-filled conventions -- filled with hoopla, noise, confusion, and not enough places to sit down. I still like reading the news from the Expo -- product announcements and especially Apple announces, as Apple uses the Expos to make big announcements.

This year, there is no hardware announcement from Apple. CEO Steve Jobs showed off Mac OS X, which looks quite good and somehow I'll have to bank my excitement since it won't be out for another six months. Apple's new Internet portal was also introduced. It's OS 9 specific, using plug-ins for some of the functionality like a virtual drive. Good move, I think, as it is something to entice people to upgrade to Mac OS 9.

So I installed the iTools software on my old PowerMac with OS 9. I'm having problems getting it to work though. Netscape 4.6 refuses to load the iTools plug-in, even when I upped the memory to 20 MB. E-mail still works, and surprisingly you can use any POP3 client to retrieve your mac.com mail. And that doesn't require Mac OS 9 so I have Eudora running on my PowerBook (Mac OS 8.6) getting any mail that arrives there.

iDisk looks particularly interesting, allowing you to put a folder on your desktop that can hold 20 MB of files (on an Apple server). It's probably just an AppleShare IP server and the iTools plug-in automa- tically mounts the right server folder. But it's a nice presentation, and that really counts for a lot to me.

One thing that one of my former co-workers said that the software industry has to develop, and that is easier to use software. That's where we should be moving. And that's an ideal that Apple has been espousing for years. When you don't have to worry about configuring your software and hardware, when you don't have to worry about doing something wrong that will crash your system, when you don't have to worry about installing a program that breaks; that's when computers will become ubiquitous.

This reminds of a little experience I had over Thanksgiving. Digital Camera, using a Compact Flash card, which -- with an adapter -- will plug into any PC Card Type II slot. On my PowerBook you just stick it in and it shows up on the desktop. On Denise's Dell notebook computer with Windows 95 or 98, I don't remember which one it was, you pop in the PC Card and nothing happens. Actually, Windows says you have to install a driver, which it does happily. Then after that you reboot and then put in the PC Card -- and nothing happens again.

After half an hour of looking through the settings I finally stumble on the problem. The driver software is using an IRQ that the printer port is using. Now, IRQs are flags that devices can set to tell the computer that that device needs attention. There are only 16 IRQs on DOS machines. That's not that big of a problem, as most computers don't need all 16 IRQs (although you can easily hit that mark on a suped up computer). The problem is that most drivers and cards only support 3-5 IRQ settings. The PC Card reader only supported three IRQ settings, which were used by other devices that looked more impor- tant. Eventually I just disabled the printer port (parallel port) and put the PC Card reader there. This is on a relatively new Windows machine that's supposed to be plug-and-play and is supposed to take care of these problems for you so you don't have to deal with them.

Stupid problems like that is why I use a Macintosh. As time goes by I know less and less about the really intricate details of the Mac OS, the kind of stuff that I used to love to learn my computer. But now it's more of a tool, and as with any tool I don't care how it works, I just want it to work all the time. And it does.