As I listened to the talking heads on the various cable TV news channels this week, I got to thinking that maybe they feel their audience is sick and tired about stories of a volatile stock market, a U.S. auto industry in distress and other oppressive events. So, having nothing better to do, they delivered warnings about the impending April Fool’s Day worm known as Conficker.

A Mac security software developer, Intego has this statement about the significance of this threat: “This worm, called Conficker, as well as Downadup and Kido, has infected unknown millions of Windows computers, and is expected to become active on April 1, 2009. For now, researchers are unsure of what the worm may do; it is just sitting on infected computers waiting for instructions. Researchers think it will connect to remote servers and download code and then become virulent.”

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You no doubt heard the report the other day, about someone cracking Apple’s Safari in just a few minutes and taking home $5,000 for their efforts. What you didn’t know, until you read the fine print of course, is that this particular person spent weeks investigating possible security flaws, and, no doubt, rehearsing the routine so it would go off without a hitch in a public presentation.

Since all software has potential security lapses, about the best you can say for this sort of exercise is that the performance was good, and maybe there ought to be an Oscar for so-called security experts who can demonstrate their skills in public with the appropriate level of bluster and efficiency.

Not mentioned in those headlines is the fact that Microsoft’s browsers also succumbed to security breaches in short order, but then you expected that right?

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I was 11 when I originally learned how to type. No, I didn’t take a course at school. In fact, my mom had rented a typewriter — an electric model — and gave me a few pointers on where to put my fingers. The rest I had to more or less figure out by myself.

That typewriter, an old IBM, was a predecessor to the legendary IBM Selectric, which became my favorite writing tool until it developed a few critical mechanical problems in the mid-1980s that would be costly to repair. However, by then, I had discovered the Mac.

However, the ultimate comfort of that Selectric was never equalled by any keyboard built by Apple. No, not even the legendary Extended Keyboard II, a product subsequently mimicked to a large extent by the Matias Tactile Pro, courtesy of similar key switches.

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When Mac OS X was first released eight years ago, a number of smart programmers found simple ways to customize the interface and behavior of Apple’s Unix-based OS. What made these methods all the more intriguing is that all they were doing was putting pretty faces on features that already existed. Only, for reason’s known only to Apple, they were simply not enabled within the graphical interface.

Consider, for example, the position of the Dock. Did you know it can be placed at the top of the screen? What sort of legerdemain do you have to use to accomplish that miracle? Well, the capability is already present, available in Mac OS X’s command line, the underbelly of the system. Such applications as TinkerTool allow you to easily access that and dozens of other features with simple checkboxes.

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