Oddments of High Unimportance

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?

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.

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 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.