Some time around 2006, I started thinking about my online passwords in a new way. Until this point, I had used a collection of perhaps a dozen gibberish passwords, which I reused on various sites depending on the sensitivity of the site. For example, my bank account would use a nearly unique password, whereas a random forum would use a very commonly reused password.

This worked acceptably well, but I frequently had to ask myself: “which password did I use when I signed up for this service?” In response to having to guess my own passwords, I made two decisions: I would start writing my passwords down, and I would make them all unique and randomly generated. Four years later, I am using a totally different system, and I’ll explain all of my reasoning.

Read on…

I just upgraded my laptop to OS X 10.5 and it’s great, but I hit one major snag along the way.  Although I thought all of the Intel Macs shipped with the new GUID partition scheme, it seems like my early-generation Macbook Pro used the old Apple partition scheme, and unless I reformatted my drive as GUID, I couldn’t install 10.5.  Fortunately, I spent the day backing up my old drive, so I just forged on, and once 10.5 was installed, I used the Migration Assistant to transfer my old home directory.

It worked…  mostly.  Partially by design, I chose to not migrate some command line tools, but now I find that every so often, I want to accomplish some task and I can’t … quite … do it, because I need to reinstall something, or perhaps reconfigure something.  I’d say 95% of the old functionality is still there, but the remaining 5% comes up often enough that it feels like something more than 5%.  The feeling is this lurking suspicion that I can’t trust my computer to do something that I know it used to be capable of, and it reminded me of a disease called Semantic Dementia. I don’t have semantic dementia in the sense of the neurological disease, but I’d like to start this off with a story about it.

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