HOW A PASSWORD CHANGED ONE MAN'S LIFE FOR THE BETTER

I had to share with my readers this, I loved it so much! It might work for you too!

“How could she do something like this to me?” said the voice in my head, over and over.

It was 2011 and I was stuck in middle of a pretty bad depression due to my divorce.

Thankfully, I think I was smart enough (and had great people around me) so I managed my way out.

One day I walk into the office, and my computer screen showed me the following message:

“Your password has expired. Click ‘Change password’ to change your password.”

I read this dumb message in my mind with angry grandpa voice:The darn password has expired.

At my workplace, the Microsoft Exchange server is configured to ask thousands of employees around the planet to change their passwords. Every 30 days.

Here what’s annoying: The server forces us to use at least one UPPERCASE character, at least one lowercase alphabetic character, at least one symbol and at least one number. Oh, and the whole thing can’t be less than 8 characters. And I can’t use any of the same passwords I’ve used in the last 3 months.

I was furious that morning. A sizzling hot Tuesday, it was 9:40 a.m and I was late to work. I was still wearing my bike helmet and had forgotten to eat breakfast. I needed to get things done before a 10 a.m. meeting and changing passwords was going to be a huge waste of time.

As the input field with the pulsating cursor was waiting for me to type a password — something I’d use many times during every day — I remembered a tip I heard from my former boss.

And I decided: I’m gonna use a password to change my life.

It was obvious that I couldn’t focus on getting things done with my current lifestyle and mood. Of course, there were clear indicators of what I needed to do — or what I had to achieve — in order to regain control of my life, but we often don’t pay attention to these clues.

The author, who changed his password...and his life.

Mauricio Estrella

The author, who changed his password...and his life.

My password became the indicator. My password reminded me that I shouldn’t let myself be victim of my recent break up, and that I’m strong enough to do something about it.

My password became: “Forgive@h3r”

I had to type this statement several times a day. Each time my computer would lock. Each time my screensaver with her photo would appear. Each time I would come back from eating lunch alone.

In my mind, I went with the mantra that I didn’t type a password. In my mind, I wrote “Forgive her” every day, for one month.

That simple action changed the way I looked at my ex wife. That constant reminder that I should forgive her led me to accept the way things happened at the end of my marriage, and embrace a new way of dealing with the depression that I was drowning into.

In the following days, my mood improved drastically. By the end of the second week, I noticed that this password became less powerful, and it started to lose its effect. A quick refresh of this ‘mantra’ helped me. I thought to myself “I forgive her” as I typed it, every time. The healing effect of it came back almost immediately.

Can password therapy really improve your life?

One month later, my dear exchange server asked me again to renew my password. I thought about the next thing I had to get done.

My password became: Quit@smoking4ever

And guess what happened. I quit smoking overnight. This password was a painful one to type during that month, but doing it helped me to yell at myself in my mind, as I typed that statement. It motivated me to follow my monthly goal.

One month later, my password became: Save4trip@thailand

Guess where I went 3 months later. Thailand. With savings.

So, I learned that I can truly change my life if I play it right. I kept doing this repeatedly month after month, with great results.

Here are some of my passwords from the last 2 years, so you get an idea of how my life has changed, thanks to this method:

Forgive@her (to my ex-wife, who started it all.)

Quit@smoking4ever (It worked.)

Save4trip@thailand (It worked.)

Eat2times@day (It never worked, still fat.)

Sleep@before12 (It worked.)

Ask@her4date (It worked. I fell in love again.)

No@drinking2months (It worked. I feel better.)

Get@c4t! (It worked. I have a beautiful cat.)

Facetime2mom@sunday (It worked. I talk with my mom every week.)

And the one for last month:

Save4@ring (Yep. Life is gonna change again, soon.)

I still anxiously await each month so I can change my password into something that I need to get done.

This method has consistently worked for me for the last 2 years, and I have shared it with a few close friends and relatives. I didn’t think it was a breakthrough in tiny-habits but it did have a great impact in my life, so that's why I'm sharing it with you. If you try it with the right mindset and attitude, maybe it could help change your life, too.

Oh, and remember: for added security, try to be a bit more complex with the words. Add symbols or numbers, or scramble a bit the beginning or the ending of your password string. S4f3ty_f1rst!

Mauricio Estrella

TODAY contributor

THE BIRTH OF DYNAMIC STEREO IN VENICE 1550-1650

The city-state of Venice was the trading and cultural centre of Europe, and optimised the spirit of the age: boundaries between sacred and secular, Church and State, nobleman and peasant, were blurred. The head of state, the Doge, was elected rather than born to the job, and he presided over both the spiritual and political affairs of the city. Much of the ceremony attached to the job took place in the basilica of St Mark or nearby, and music played an important role in these public functions. 

And what a gorgeous music it was! Andrea Gabrieli (1510-85) hit upon the idea of combining choirs with groups of instruments (cornetts and sackbuts), producing a sumptuous sound that matched the opulence of the time perfectly. Placing more emphasis on the richness of harmonies than the interplay of the different voices, he simplified the polyphonic style, giving the music a sense of grandeur. Most dramatically, though, he experimented with the spatial possibilities of St Mark's, using a device called antiphony: placing different groups of performers in various places around the church to give a stereo (or even quadra) effect. Listen to Maria Stabat Ad Monumentum, a 6 recorded in St Mark's.

St Mark's Basilica

One of the reasons antiphony caught on in Venice was architecture of St Mark's. Its huge interior was acoustically between suited to chordal than polyphonic music, and included various ideal places for choirs and instrumental ensembles. Music came to the audience  from all directions -organ galleries, balconies and platforms round the altar area - and the effect was shattering. 

His nephew Giovanni Gabrieli (c. 1554-1612) carried on the family tradition and published music by both of them, including canzonas (ensemble pieces in the new style) and sonatas (pieces to be played, as opposed to cantatas, pieces to be sung), and also a new form which he called concerti. These instrumental works, with contrasting groups of instruments) for example strings and bass) holding a kind of dialogue, were the ancestors of modern concerto which contrast a solo instrument with the full orchestra. A recording of his Magnificat a 14 with incredible sound effects. Just imagine hearing it live in a church with great acoustics! 

Goodbye Renaissance, Hello Baroque

The emphasis on contrast and harmony, rather than polyphony, marked the end of the Renaissance period in music, and foreshadowed the next era - the Baroque. 

The composer who bridged the gap between Renaissance and Baroque, Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643) ended up in Venice as Maestro di Capella (Master of the Chapel) at St Mark's Basilica following in the Gabrieli's footsteps. But the century started with a literally dramatic development - opera. 

A short video with Monteverdi's Missa in Illo Tempore 

Science versus religion

Outside Venice, the Church wasn't yet quite so tolerant of new ideas. Science contradicted traditional teachings, and people like poor old Galileo Galilei were hauled up in front of the Inquisition for their 'heresies'. Nevertheless, although the simplification of polyphony smacked of humanism, it did make the service accessible to punters...

Collector's items 1900-1967 Hungary

Nationalism didn't really get going in Hungary as quickly as elsewhere - unless you count Brahms and Liszt and their Hungarian dances and rhapsodies. The Habsburg Empire ruled over the territory until 1918, and Viennese influence was strong, but many Hungarians had a powerful sense of national identity. A couple of young composers met up in Budapest just after the turn of the century, and discovered they both wanted to write in a truly Hungarian style, incorporating folk song into their music. So, Bela Bartok (1881-1945) and Zoltan Kodaly (1882-1967) set out together to collect songs systematically, using the latest recording techniques.

What they found was a source of material richer than they had hoped for: not the gipsy violin music of the city cafes, but real Magyar (Hungarian in Hungarian) peasant music, and lots of it. As first they restricted themselves to Hungary, but their later field trips extended into neighbouring Romania, Transylvania and Slovakia. The travelling came to end with the First World War, but they had already built ip impressive catalogue and established themselves among the first ethnomusicologists (great word meaning people who study music of various cultures).

They also took an interest in what was happening in the contemporary classical scene, studying composers as diverse as Richard Strauss and Debussy, and integrating elements of their styles into their own music too. By 1910 when their first string quartets were premiered, they had developed a distinctive modern Hungarian sound.

Kodaly restricted himself to Magyar folk music, using tunes he had collected as themes in his work, and established himself as a truly Hungarian composer at around the time Hungary gained its independence. Bartok, however, spread his net wider and took the process further. He drew on sources from all over Eastern Europe, and even Turkey and North Africa, and his research into folk music whetted his appetite for exotic scales and modes. Not content with merely quoting or imitating, he tried to capture the essence of his findings by detailed analysis and reconstruction, adding his own personal slant. He was not only meticulous in his work, but also reserved and introverted ( a quality that was refreshingly unlike his contemporary, Stravinsky) and this shows in his music.

Okay, he could, when he wanted, write exuberant  dance-inspired music for orchestra, and his three stage works are at times violently expressive, but even when writing on a large scale he tends to be rather broodingly introspective. He was more comfortable with piano and chamber music, where especially in the six string quartets, he emerged as one of the giants of music in the twentieth century.

You will enjoy Kodaly. Everybody does. Especially the orchestral music. The suit from his opera Hary Janos is fun and so are the Dances of Galanta, Dances of Marosszek and the Peacock Variations. For the more serious side, the two string quartets, or the glorious Psalmus Hungaricus.

Bartok's last work, the Concerto for Orchestra is one of my favourite and it is probably the most approachable, but give the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta a try too. And there is always the opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle, the ballet The Wooden Prince or the mime drama The Miraculous Mandarin. But the best stuff, in my opinion, is in the six string quartets, the three piano concertos and the amazing Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion.  The Nine Splendid Stags, in English, originally titled The Cantata Profana, is an amazing legend. On this recording Bartok himself telling the story in Hungarian before the music starts. 

Canberra Choral Society's history under Piroska Varga conductor 2000-2001

On a day like this!