Practical Living hints

Website passwords

Most of the companies you will do business with on the web are safe and share data. Keep a list of your user names and passwords in an address book or spreadsheet. Choose one user name you can use everywhere. It should be unique amongst several million users so you won't have to make up new ones. eg. FirstMiddleRareword## The passwords should be few and memorable and sorted by security level. I have one for: info-sites, shopping, chatsites, email, & critical admin. They go something like: Tree##, DebtCard##, BlahBlahBlah##, Eatingwords## and InvisibleDogName##. Nothing more to remember.

If you are creating unique passwords for each site like xyT5^ov6P I feel sorry for you. Password hacking programs are unlikely to care these days about such efforts. Just come up with something your jealous ex-lover won't guess.

Phone Services

Phone calls: Unless you have a 'nickel plan' or something similar I recommend you dial 10-10-220 for calls ranging from 18-25 minutes and 10-10-345 for calls under or over that time.
10-10-345 charges 10¢ + 5¢ a minute (last I checked)
10-10-220 charges $1 for the first 20 minutes and 7¢/min. thereafter.
If you make 10-10-220 your long distance carrier (as I have done), the first minute is 7¢ without the $1 charge in case you get an answering machine. Also you don't have to dial 10-10-220 first.

Cheaper services seem to have poor sound quality.