In the late '90s, I decided I wanted to take piano lessons. By chance, a flyer at the Regulator Bookshop let me know about Mara Gibson, a Duke PhD student in composing, who taught piano on the side. I worked with her, I think, for about 2 years before she left Durham to finish her PhD.

A few memories I have from that period:

• Those big dogs!
• Chatting about art, the art instinct, the artist's life, etc.
• I found that when I practiced every day, even if just for 15 minutes, my playing got better. Weird.

Mara held an annual recital for her students at the back of Boyce Piano Emporium on 15-501. I didn't realize up till then that she mostly taught elementary- up to high school-age kids, who sat at the front of the room, with about 7 or 8 of her adult students sitting behind them (along with all the parents). After the last little person played his song, Mara called my name and I could hear the titters and amused murmurs from the audience as I lumbered up to the piano to announce my recital piece.

"Hi," I said, "my name is Mike Brown and I started taking lessons with Mara about eight months ago. I'll be playing three short pieces by Dmitry Kabalevsky. And," I paused, looking around the room at the kids and parents, "I believe I'm the first person playing today who is over 6 feet tall." That got a nice laugh and Liz said later it definitely broke the tension.

Many parents came up afterward to congratulate me and expressed their wonder and admiration at my performing a recital piece in front of a room full of people. I thanked them and then waved my hand at the kids -- who had just done the same thing that I did. The parents seemed to think that performing was something children naturally did, whereas putting oneself in a position where one could fail (or succeed!) publicly was something they couldn't conceive of an adult doing.

Mara eventually left Duke with her husband, the artist Brett Reif, to finish her PhD. Since 2004, she has been on the faculty of the  Conservatory of Music and Dance, University of Missouri-Kansas City. She leads the life of a busy artist, academic, and mother and I'm so happy to see her making so many big contributions to her art and her community.

Mara has also started selling some of her compositions digitally: Canopy and the hypnotic Map of Rain Hitting Water (embedded below). You can listen to the full pieces and then purchase and download them to your computer. It is so cool to have a Mara Gibson playlist on my iPod!

Without the topic of school to provide a throughline or readymade theme for the blog – which was the reason for its birth, after all – the content of my posts has scattered itself across self-help, tech, and cultural themes, though there has been silliness too. Mustn’t forget silliness.

I tend to find the longform deepdish essays more satisfying to write; they also sometimes require longer gestation periods or hours of intense focus. I always enjoyed Montaigne’s  brief essays in his first book and that served as a sort of model when I started blogging in the mid-aughts. Although it is telling that his longer essays in Book 3 tend to be both the most conversational and the ones I and others enjoy re-reading the most.

I start a post with the intent to keep it brief, but I too often fall in love with the sound of my writing voice, and – as if I were having a conversation with myself – think about this or that idea which simply must be mentioned. I need to curb that tendency though; in technical writing, the worst thing you can do is to dump every thing you know into the documentation. It shows a lack of discrimination in understanding what to include and what to leave out. This makes the reader’s experience less pleasant and their job even harder.

For the longform essays, I try to follow the advice of academic writing coaches and start a post by writing a key sentence for each paragraph. When I see the thread of the argument, I can thicken the blessay with more detail and supporting evidence. Having decided what I will include, I am more likely to stay on track and let go of ideas or witticisms that don’t fit.

I try to. More often, I simply start typing and ramble away, generating huge rafts of text that need to be considered, pruned, tossed out, refined, etc. Whichever method I use depends on my mood, time, energy, and so on. I am consistent in my inconstancy.

I find that writing about my personal systems for organization or productivity or techie stuff are usually fun and easy to write. They can be long, though. When I write about things that are a little more personal and ruminative — such as my information packrat nature or what I find inspiring and why — I touch more chords with my reader(s). In the end, I write about whatever I want to spend time thinking about and playing with. I find that I’m not reading as much as I used to , but I’m writing more, and I think that’s a fair tradeoff.

One of my goals for the blog reboot was to burn through a lot of ideas that had piled up during the years when I was not blogging regularly. Then, after I’d gone through those, my plan was to see what was left for me to write about. But as I predicted in my first post, the more I write, the more I find to write about. I do sometimes raid the old list, but I as often pluck new ideas to think about as well.

Of course, the real topic of a personal blog is me, my life, my interests, and my exploration of my thoughts. And journaling the process of “learning as I go.” These posts are cups drawn from a well that, so far, thankfully, seems bottomless.

I started out writing my blog posts every morning for about 15-30 minutes, but now I may write throughout the day or write three on a Sunday night or tinker with a post or posts throughout the week.

In fact, this series on what I’ve learned from my recent blogging experience started as a brain dump of disconnected bits (and may read that way, I don’t know). I’ve tinkered with various bits of it over the course of a week, a la Mark Forster’s continuous revision idea, adding sentences, fleshing out fragments, moving paragraphs around.

I seem to have two speeds when it comes to posting: the quick hit-and-run post with a link to something interesting, or a more in-depth musing that benefits from my walking around it every couple of days and judging how it looks from all angles.

What is also happening is that I find myself thinking about writing posts all the time. When something crosses my path, I wonder if it will make good blog fodder (blodder?). Newspaper columnists face the same situation; the column becomes a hungry beast that demands incessant feeding and attention.

My tools adapt themselves to the kind of writing I'm doing that day or week. I discovered I'm fine composing my quicker posts with the WordPress editor. Longer posts tend to start out in nvALT and may move to Microsoft Word, if I want to use the tools there. (I also keep a long list of ideas in nvALT and add to it all the time.)

I thought at one time I'd buy MarsEdit or some other desktop app to write my posts off-line, but I find that it's not really necessary. I build my posts up in layers, so the tool I use is independent of the writing/gestation process. I work on the words in several passes, move the text to WordPress, layer in the links in another, and then use the Zemanta plugin to suggest images or to spur my quest to find better ones. I don't always use the same tool for the initial drafts.

Before I publish, I preview the post and read it again in the browser; I regularly find formatting, typo, and phrasing problems that way.

This process is not bulletproof, of course. I would like a more scheduled, routine time to write and edit my posts, rather than the pockets of time I spend on it throughout the week. My drafting process feels too haphazard and too subject to disruption.

I'm at that point on the mastery curve where I've plateaued. The big a-HA! discoveries of technique and content came in the first 2 or 3 weeks, and I'm now trying to establish a regular writing routine, an assembly line that can crank out widgets in the shape of blog posts. The a-has are rather slower in coming and I need to be content waiting for the idea or insight that kicks me up to the next level.

Until then: make lots of pots.

I started the Monday-Friday blogging cycle on July 30 and am surprised to find myself still here and churning out posts. My goal was to do 50 posts -- 10 weeks of posting -- and I passed the 5-week mark on August 31. So -- to echo this blog's subtitle -- what have I been learning as I go? The next series of blog posts explores my typically blathering answers.

Epic or epigrammatic?

Andy Ihnatko said on a recent Ihnatko Almanac podcast that he yearns to do brief blog posts, a la John Gruber's Daring Fireball blog (my own model would be Michael Leddy's Orange Crate Art). But whenever he starts writing, the post grows to 800 words and it's not a brief 2-sentence comment that concisely distills his feelings on an issue -- no, it's a full-out deepdish essay that could be a chapter in a book. For Andy, Twitter is the microblog he prefers because it enforces a length restriction.

The desire for concision vs completeness is true for me. My gambit of setting a timer to write for 15 minutes worked for a week, and then not at all. When it alarms, I simply shut it off, continue writing, and maybe take a break later, if I think about it. I'm a natural longform blogger, I suppose. My posts on Doctor Who and being an information packrat were intended to be single posts with only a few sentences on my opinions. But the opinions quickly got out of hand.

I have, therefore, gotten a bit better at noticing when I will need to break a post into parts and adjusting the writing accordingly. If the goal is to post 5 days/week, then I break the long ones into multiple parts, artfully round off each part so it stands as a whole (I hope), and so meet my self-imposed quota.

This post, for example, started as a bulleted list of random sentences and ideas, which I shaped into four organized thematic sections, added links and more contextual "thickener," as it were, and the draft mysteriously embiggened itself to 1200+ words. I was about to hit the Publish button on this monster when I thought, "Wait a second -- I could get four days of posts out of this!"

And on such expedient decisions are great works of art made.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
~ Mary Oliver

• The History of Outlining
• The "Victorian laptop" (hat tip to Taking Note)
• Straining the soup ever more thinly. Haven't we said all that there needs to be said about the Pythons? Haven't they done other work in their long careers? I'd much rather see brand new reissues of the Big Red Book and Brand New Papperbok.
• Solve a problem by looking at it. Very much a Taoist idea, I think -- solve by not-solving.
• A new theory that Jack the Ripper was a cart driver who told police he discovered the first victim.

In my PhD methods class, our professor asked us to pick something that inspired us -- it could be a song, a research article, a movie, a book chapter -- make a brief presentation on it and on how it inspired us in our work. Inspiration can come from unexpected sources and feed us in non-obvious ways. This assignment nudged us into coming out about what we found exciting and how we could use it as a touchstone in our research. Great things are always great, and no matter how they may differ in detail, there is something common in their essence.

Now, what inspired my fellow students may not have inspired me, and vice versa. I  recall that someone brought in an academic paper and another brought in a book of haiku. What our professor had us do was look inside ourselves to find our own sources of mental and emotional support; scholarly work is seemingly endless and often tedious, so being able to boost yourself by calling forth your own inspirational touchstones can be life-saving and morale-boosting.

I submitted the following YouTube videos of two artists performing immaculate work. Watch them now, and I'll talk about what I found -- and still find -- inspiring about them.

John Jorgensen Quintet: Ghost Dance

Fred Astaire performing “Puttin’ on the Ritz” from the movie “Blue Skies”: Vimeo

Good golly, where do I start??

Let's start with the fact that I picked two performing artists -- not sports figures (don't like sports) nor writers (though I fancy myself of the writerly persuasion). I have always loved performers of all stripes -- dancers, jugglers, musicians, magicians, etc. These are people who have the courage to think they can entertain us, to show us something we've not seen before. You could call it hubris, or you can call it confidence. I would call it a belief and faith in their own skills and abilities.

Inspiration #1: If you believe you can, you can.

These are examples of the power of mastery. These are guys whose skills have been crafted, honed, protected, nurtured and sharpened over many years of deliberate practice and creating and performing songs and dances so that they can do what you saw over and over again, flawlessly. (There are other recordings of Jorgensen playing "Ghost Dance" and all of them are played at that fast tempo and sound pristine.) I'd call this the "iceberg principle" of success, except that I'm sure someone's already called it that. How many hundreds of hours of work did it take to conceive and execute those 3-4 minutes of diamond-sharp perfection?

Inspiration #2: Even Fred Astaire had to put in the hours to become Fred Astaire. Getting good doesn't happen overnight. It takes work. To echo Cal Newport's motto: Be so good they can't ignore you.

My banjo teacher has me say the syllables "e-ven" with every pluck of the string, and I am to keep saying it even if my fingers fumble through a particular passage. The goal is to keep the rhythm until I can collect myself and jump back into the song. As he puts it, "The other musicians aren't going to stop if you lose your place and start the song over. They're just going to keep playing."

Lookit how fast Jorgensen is moving those fingers! The pace doesn't stop and the rhythm doesn't slow down if he's having an off night. No matter how fast and frantic the music gets, he's calm, relaxed, poised. Jorgensen and Astaire are not just in the flow, they're controlling the flow. And they make it look easy because they've put in the work that makes the hard look easy.

In life, we don't have a band behind us pushing to keep the beat. But we have calendars and commitments to others and the seasons, among other pacesetters. Life doesn't pause until you have time to catch your breath. You have to breathe while playing like mad.

Inspiration #3: Work hard, keep practicing, and you can set the tempo (and look cool doing it). Eventually, it'll all look easy to anyone who hasn't done the work.

I have these two videos in a YouTube playlist called ENERGY! I return to these videos periodically when I'm flagging or in the doldrums. No matter how many times I see the videos in that playlist, I never tire of them. They always seem fresh. Many books and movies that were touchstones in my youth have not survived with me into adulthood, but these videos (and all the other books and music and DVDs that stock my shelves) have stayed with me for years.

Inspiration #4: Truly inspiring things stay evergreen; you can grow old with them and they will always have lessons to teach.

Finally, looking at these inspiring videos makes me feel like I want to create something as fun, as beautiful, as energetic, and as inspiring. And that, for me, may be the commonality among all inspiring things I hold close. I won't be able to play the guitar or tap dance like these guys, but I can attack what I want to do -- a short story, a blog post, a business, a PowerPoint presentation -- with energy, spirit, discipline, and (I hope) humor. These inspiring things teach me that that the audience or the customer will never see all the hours I put into the work. But if what I create connects, I want it to be a show-stopper.

I never fiddled with iTunes before I bought my iPod 5G in 2010 as my birthday present to myself. I found -- and still find -- iTunes to be both useful and maddening. Kirk McElhearn's Take Control of iTunes ebook is a great resource for the music fan who just wants to get things done in iTunes and I recommend it. But I daresay that one of the things within the ken of even the most novice user are rating music tracks. You can rate an album or each track of an album from 1 to 5 stars. Ratings are most useful in conjunction with smart playlists, where you can specify that only 5-star rated songs can be included or exclude any 2-star songs, and so on.

Given my mania for wanting to do things "right" (yeesh) I scoured the web for advice on different ratings systems. Most of the advice follows the standard "more stars=higher quality" pattern, like star ratings for movies. Yet I thought that too simplistic and too labor-intensive. Why would I want to rate every song in my iTunes collection? Why even bother rating tracks I dislike or am indifferent about? And -- why keep them in iTunes if I don't like them, anyway?

Jason Guthrie had the best selection of non-standard advice, with two ideas that I began using right away: use one-stars for punishment and rate tracks by intensity. So here's how I rate my tracks:

• One-star tracks are songs I don't want to hear at all, ever again. One-star tracks are excluded from my smart playlists. And though I haven't done this yet, I could view all one-star tracks and simply delete them from iTunes so they never darken my earbuds again.
• Two-star tracks are slow, haunting, somewhat melancholy songs -- Barber's Adagio for Strings comes to mind. These tracks evoke a  reflective mood. I tend to listen to this smart playlist in the morning, drinking my first coffee of the day, when the rest of the world is quiet.
• Three-star tracks are a little more upbeat but medium tempo; the pace of a relaxed heartbeat, perhaps. Not surprisingly, most of the tunes I rate fall into this bucket and I can listen to this at any time; it's like a personal radio station of easy listening music and includes classical, pop, world, lounge, and other genres.
• Four-star tracks are the upbeat, fast-paced tracks with a driving beat that put a silly grin on my face. "Jaan Pehechan-Ho" is the go-to example here, but so is "The Intro and the Outro." I tend to play this late in the day when my energy flags and I want a pick-me-up.
• Five-stars ... I haven't come up with a need for five star ratings yet. So I'm reserving this classification until a great idea comes my way.

I don't rate absolutely every track in iTunes, as that way lies madness. I only rate those tunes I like well enough to want to listen to again. So my 2-, 3-, and 4-star playlists hold only a fraction of all the music I've recorded or downloaded so far, yet they're the tracks that give me the most pleasure.

The ratings by intensity reminds me of a tip I read from Michael Neill, I think, where he recommended creating playlists based on your mood. So when you're in a bad mood and want to feel better, create a ladder of playlists that take you from low to high. Start by listening  to the playlist with songs that resonate with your sad or angry mood. Then, move to a playlist with songs that are less dark, more bright. Then, move to a playlist of songs with happier associations. In this way, you can use your iPod to make yourself feel better just by listening to music.

And if you don't want to go to all the trouble of creating moody playlists, well, there's an app for that.

Oh dear, my carefully crafted image as a man of the book and too clever by half will now fall to the ground when I talk about "Doctor Who" fanboyishness. Ah well -- let the egg roll, as they say.  I don't ride motorcycles or jump out of airplanes, I just document my little life on the web and try to pass the time agreeably with all I meet.

Now, on to my Doctor Who viewing habits:

• I usually purchase a season pass via iTunes for the SD (rather than HD) version.
• I usually download it on Sunday morning and enjoy watching it Sunday night.
• A day or so afterward, I read what Ross Ruediger and Steven Cooper have to say about the episode, finishing with the Wikipedia entry on the episode, to get a sense of what the mainstream reviewers thought of the show and any interesting tidbits the other fellows left out. I find myself  more in agreement with Steven's reviews, as he packs a lot of context and interpretation into his posts, and usually highlights the best lines that really express character or emotion.

• The classic rule of writing is that the ending should be in the beginning. Those seeds should be planted early on. And it is, during Amy's model shoot where she punches at the camera with HATE and LOVE written on her fingers. Clever Mr. Moffat -- signaling his themes right from the start, punched right in your face. (With a tip of the hat, of course, to Charles Laughton's "Night of the Hunter," where Robert Mitchum's character has those letters tattooed on his fingers. One of those movie images that has entered into the collective unconscious.)
• Jenna-Louise Coleman as Oswin was brilliant. As she was never in the same room as the actors she was talking to, she had to generate all the energy and interest in the scene herself. And it was impossible not to fall in love with her.
• When Oswin bids the Doctor to "remember her," Jenna Louise-Coleman smiles and looks directly at the camera, breaking the fourth wall --  she's asking US to remember HER. And we will, when she reappears in the Christmas special. Despite Ross's impatience with the season 6 arc, it looks like The Moff is laying plans for another long-term payoff.
• Making the audience see and fall in love with Oswin is rather like the device used in "A Beautiful Mind." A clever trick played on an audience that believes everything it sees because that's what medium forces you to do. Another masterful Moffat misdirection.
• The moment when Amy hallucinates and sees a room of elegantly dressed men and women was so wonderfully surreal and unexpected that it took my breath away. A really bold choice; it doesn't advance the plot, really, or reveal character, but it pushes the right buttons of disorientation and keeping you watching the screen to see what happens next. It's the kind of moment you never see in a Davies script.
• It was a show on a grand scale, but it didn't feel as big or affecting as "Family of Blood" or "Amy's Choice" or "The Girl Who Waited". Hard to say why -- possibly because it was so hard to believe that Amy and Rory's marriage was over; the "Pond Life" mini-episodes that ran the five days prior to the season premiere showed them rolling with the flow of their odd life together. These two people have gone through fire for each other; this divorce gimmick felt like a gimmick and diminished whatever emotional power this subplot might have had.
• Or the smallness of the show could have also been that there's something terrifying about one maniacal Dalek on the loose or a small number of them in a confined space. But seeing a bazillion Daleks just sitting and quivering in place flattens the effect; more than one or two Daleks just isn't scary. Though hearing a bazillion screaming Daleks is spine-chilling.
• Loved the trapezoidal passageways in the asylum, as they call back to the First Doctor's inital visit to Skaro.

Ross Ruediger had a rather sour take on season 6 of Doctor Who. He had problems with Matt Smith's puppydog energy and showrunner Steven Moffat's "celebration of the clever" in dialogue and plotting the season-long story arc, which culminated in the solution to the mysteries of how the Doctor "died" and his connection to River Song.

It's a matter of taste. I believe Moffat when he says that kids have no trouble following the plot complications and it's the fans and critics who complain the most. I certainly enjoyed the cleverness of how (most) everything in seasons 5 and 6 clicked together; I like trying to outguess a master storyteller like The Moff. And I don't think the arc worked against the show's episodic nature, although I could argue that this is a Doctor Who for the modern age of TV, and season arcs, DVD collections, and being a flagship moneymaker for the BBC necessitate all sorts of choices that couldn't have been imagined during the Classic Series' run.

I like Moffat's and Matt Smith's conception of the Doctor as a man who doesn't ruminate and smolder over the past; there's a colder, more cerebral, more dangerous edge to this Doctor than I've seen in the previous two incarnations. The choice he forces on Rory in "The Girl Who Waited" is a prime example of this

I agree with Ross that Smith is probably a better dramatic actor for this part than Tennant, but the modern Doctor is now an amalgam of producer and actor, more so than it ever was in the classic series. And, Moffat is giving Smith stuff to play with that Tennant never had. Moffat is clever and a little shifty, therefore so is the Doctor (and Sherlock!). And Smith adds his own dollop of secret sauce to the recipe; I always have the feeling that, in most every scene, Smith's Doctor is holding back some information he's telling no one else, and this knowledge informs the actor's choices of glance and gesture. I daresay this is information that is never vouchsafed to the viewer.

Given that the Doctor is a time traveler, it's inevitable that he will know more than the people around him, and so he has to guard against spoilers; therefore, he can't really tell his companions all he knows. But also, as he hinted at in "Amy's Choice", he has a lot of darkness to contend with in his personal history. Being openly emotional might unravel his rather tightly wound demeanor. Without the distractions of monsters and dashing here and there and fixing the TARDIS, he would have to contend with his past. Maybe even forgive himself. Better, perhaps, to live in an eternal now -- of Daleks, Amy and Rory's marriage, life-threatening dangers, seductive puzzles -- and not raise ghosts.

Ross pointed out a qualitative difference between Moffat's cleverness and Davies' naked emotion. For me, the emotion in Moffat's work is more powerful dramatically because the characters are so restrained so much of the time. The Doctor's tears at the end of "The Doctor's Wife" and the utter joy at Amy and Rory's wedding party are proof of that for me.

But I will allow that nothing in Seasons 5 and 6 have come close to the feelings of sadness and loss as did "Dalek" or "Family of Blood" or "Midnight" or "Turn Left." Those moments were, I think, given some extra polish and handcrafting by Davies because those were the kinds of moments that moved him; Moffat would have emphasized different moments, different beats, different colors. That's simply how writers are. Doctor Who is neither Davies nor Moffat; it's both of them, and everything that came before them. And the mythos is greater because it can contain them all, from the mugging of Tom Baker to the gravity of Christopher Eccleston.

What I like particularly about Moffat's stories, beyond the whipsmart dialogue and whiplashing plot twists (and even if it were only those things, I'd still love them), is something I never perceived in Davies' work: the surreality of Moffat's imagery. The child in the gas mask, the astronaut in the lake, the Weeping Angels, the mad version of London at the start of "The Wedding of River Song": these are arresting images and TV thrives on arresting images. They're attention-getting and get people talking. And they don't lose their potency on successive viewings. The Season 7 opener contained one surreal sequence in particular that knocked me backwards; it was the kind of experience I'd never have had in a Davies story.

I had intended this to be a review of the first episode of the new Season 7, with a brief digression about  Ross's review. But as usual, my words got away from me. Tomorrow: my stray thoughts on "Asylum of the Daleks."

• One of my favorite writing sites is by England-based sitcom writer James Cary and called, appropriately, "Sitcom Geek". What I love about his posts are his practical and serious thoughts on the business of conceiving and writing situation- and character-based comedy (as opposed to sketch or standup comedy). Here's his latest post, echoing the feelings/advice I read on many academics' and fiction-writers' sites: Just start typing
• Another favorite blog is by self-help writer and editor Doug Toft. Here's one of his latest: 7 things to know before you use a self-help technique
• I also enjoy the rough and ready booster shot that is the language learning site, All Japanese All The Time. Khatzumoto continues to stun me with his inventiveness and cheek in generating advice on how to teach yourself any language (especially Japanese). A great read for auto-didacts and those who want to be. Here's a recent post that helped me make up my mind on a personal issue that had stymied me: The problem is choice
• Who killed lard?
• Zombie grammar rules that eat your brain. First on the menu: split infinitives.
• Fascinating: Sewer workers (and dwellers) of Victorian London

I ran across the following rule many years ago in what looks like a student paper (PDF link) by a fellow named Bernie Thomas and posted on the SANS site. SANS is a security training organization. For sites where minimal security is a criterion, I tend to favor using this rule as it's generally easy for me to remember. For high security, I rely on 1Password to generate hard-to-crack passwords. However, I can only use 1Password on my MacBook at home, and cannot easily access its stored information on my Windows PC at work. Therefore, I prefer having a simple password-creation routine that I can use to access low- to minimum-security sites in both locations.

The paper dates from 2005 and it could be argued that the world it was created for has already passed. Google and now Dropbox are offering two-factor authentication to provide extra security for sites that can hold the keys to your online identity. However, if you don't have a password-generation program, Bernie's paper contains several different algorithms for generating personalized and tough-to-crack passwords.

The method relies on scrambling a word by adding numbers, capital letters, and special characters according to a set of input rules. By memorizing the input rules and a few tokens, you can create a medium to strong password for any site you visit.

So there are two parts to the following method, which Bernie explicitly identifies for generating logon passwords:

A. TOKEN CREATION

1. Pick any special character you will always use with your password. Examples: !@#$%^& (*+)=-;:’”~`][}{|><?/.,
2. Pick a Secret Code: a 3- or 4-digit number you'll always remember. It could be a special date (such as an anniversary) or, if this is a password you have to change regularly, it could be the date you change the password.
3. Pick a very simple Memory Cue that you will remember. This will be the root word for the password. It could be the name of the site (Yahoo, CNN, New York Times) or the application, etc.

B. CREATE THE PASSWORD

1. Surround the root password with the special character.
2. Insert the Secret Code number after the second character of the root word.
3. Capitalize the first character after the Secret Code.
4. Optional - If you're changing the password every 90 days, add the creation date to the end of the password. Use the calendar quarter and the year to create a 5-digit number. So Q1 of 2012 would generate 12012.

Here are some examples of these rules in action from Bernie's paper:

• @
• 4556
• Tim
• @Tim@
• @Ti4556m@
• @Ti4556M@
• @Ti4556M@12012

For a Yahoo account:

• @
• 4556
• yahoo
• @yahoo@
• @ya4556hoo@
• @ya4556Hoo@
• @ya4556Hoo@12012

So, for any new site I visit, I can generate a memorable password that has special characters, capital letters, and numbers and (generally) avoids any dictionary words in its components.

What if the site I'm on doesn't let me use special characters or imposes a character limit? I usually drop the special character and simply go as far as I can until I reach the character limit.

Again, the paper has many more examples of different ways to mix and match these rules. He includes different tweaks on the rules to generate both simple to remember and difficult passwords.