Most sites requiring registration ask you to choose a “secret question” to which only you supposedly know the answer. Of course, in the age of Google, the city where you were born and your mother’s maiden name may no longer be the best kept secrets in the world.

So, next time you register for a site and it asks for your response to a challenge question, choose something that’s completely insane, but really memorable to you.

More baby step questions

Unclutterer: Paper clutter begone, part 4

Handy tips on what to shred and when.

Shred Now:

• Credit card applications
• Any piece of unwanted paper that contains: addresses, account numbers or access information, birth dates, budgets, copies of “never shred” documents listed below, drivers license numbers, employment information, envelopes and address labels, estimates, legal papers, luggage tags, medical information, passwords, report cards, signatures, social security numbers, transcripts, travel itineraries, used airline tickets, and anything you wouldn’t feel comfortable having a stranger read
• Expired credit cards, bank cards, passports, visas, and identification cards (college, military, employee badges, etc.)
• Credit checks on tenants or other home employees (contractors, nannies, etc.) immediately after evaluating the information

And I couldn't agree more about picking up the best, fastest, securest, and highest-volume shredder you can afford. If you buy purely on price (picking up one of those drug store models that's the size of a guest bathroom's wastebasket), you'll regret it immediately.

Treat yourself to a multi-page monster that can gobble CDs and staples, and you're much more likely to use it in a regular and timely manner -- as in every day, when you pick up that pile of credit card applications with your info all over them. As suggested, I second the motion to shred that crap the second it arrives.

Two stories that I know I should be learning from:

• Paul Graham on overcoming distractions. By creating an Internet-Only computer.
  Quote:

  I now leave wifi turned off on my main computer except when I need to transfer a file or edit a web page, and I have a separate laptop on the other side of the room that I use to check mail or browse the web. (Irony of ironies, it's the computer Steve Huffman wrote Reddit on. When Steve and Alexis auctioned off their old laptops for charity, I bought them for the Y Combinator museum.)
  

Odeo: Ian Shoales on Wasting Time

43 Folders welcomes guest commentator Ian Shoales on the subject of wasting time. (2:20)

More on Ian Shoales at http://www.ianshoales.com/

Grab the MP3, learn more at Odeo.com, or just listen from here:

hipster pda Originally uploaded by leff. “Yeah, so I went to school for computers. I do live online. And yet I have never found a task management solution that works better than this stack of 3x5 cards.” More fun pix available at the Hipster PDA tag on Flickr.

To be a good builder, you need a feel for what surrounds you. Christopher Alexander knows. [SFGate.com]

Berkeley's Christopher Alexander -- author of A Pattern Language -- talks with Chron art critic Kenneth Baker in a 2-part feature discussing his career and his 4-volume collection, The Nature of Order (official book site)

A few months back Mike Harris wrote us up a great article on Remind, a very cool and flexible little UNIX app for tracking date-based events. If you enjoy Remind and are using Tiger (OS X 10.4), checkout Nick Vargish’s Remind Widget. Gives you all the power of Remind in a pretty and configurable package. Great work, Nick!

Bokardo » Apple Making Huge Social Software Push?

Via Andy, here's a thought-provoking post that draws from a mosaic of current and forthcoming features (including Wiki Server, iCal Calendar Sharing and the nifty-sounding Teams) to suggest that Apple's moving toward some interesting directions in social software and enhanced functionality for teams.

Joshua writes:

Notice that all of these features are about enabling communication as much as they are about creating content. It’s about getting the right information to the right person at the right time through interaction with their friends and associates. That’s how we do things out here in meatspace, so that’s how we’ll do things in cyberspace as well.

I think this is good news for Apple. As the proliferation of telephones, cellphones, chat software, blogs, and social networking sites have shown, there seems to be a market for this social software stuff…