I just remembered something my dad used to do for me that I loved

Earlier this week I had a post here describing how I used to play board games by myself as a kid whenever my friends weren't around.

It reminded me of another gaming activity I used to do solo that was a lot of fun, and it was thanks to my dad that I ever did it in the first place.

Like a lot of sports-minded kids in the late-70s, I owned the Mattel "Classic Football" electronic game pictured above. It was extremely primitive compared with the Madden football video games of today, but to us it was great and I never tired of playing it.

One time my dad drew up a bracket involving all 28 NFL teams (at the time) in a single-elimination tournament. He did it by hand on a sheet of paper. I can still picture his distinctive left-handed writing in which the various first-round match-ups were laid out (Dallas vs. New England, Minnesota vs. Houston, Cleveland vs. San Diego, etc.)

My job was to play each game of the tournament on the Mattel device and write down the result on the tournament bracket. Over the course of a few days I could play all of the games and determine a "champion."

Being a budding Cleveland sports fan, I wanted desperately for the Browns to win the tournament, so I would admittedly play a little harder whenever I was representing them.

But just like real life, no matter how much I tried, some other team always won out in the end. It was never my guys.

Dad created similar tournament brackets for me on several occasions, and it infuriated me once when, despite my best efforts, the hated Pittsburgh Steelers won my little electronic simulation.

To my credit, though, no matter how much I didn't like it, I always accepted the result of each game however it turned out. No do-overs or anything like that.

Now, from a distance of 45 years, I realize not only how much fun I had playing out these tournaments, but also how enjoyable it probably was for Dad to set up the brackets for me whenever I asked. 

It was a time-consuming task, I'm sure, and he would have been perfectly justified to say he simply couldn't do it. But he never said no.

What a great dad he was to me. I miss him.

My opinion of you will not be affected by the tires you have on your car

As I knew would happen, I find myself these days walking through parking lots looking at people's tires to see which brand they have.

I recently joked on Facebook that I now judge you depending on which tires you bought, but that's not really true. I don't tend to be particularly judgmental in the first place, since my opinions and preferences are clearly no better than yours.

But I'll admit that, when I check out those four tires on someone's vehicle, I'm rooting to see "Goodyear" and the iconic wing-foot logo molded into the sidewalls.

This is more about rooting for the team I represent than anything else. Michelin, Bridgestone, and other companies make great tires, just as Goodyear does, so it's not like you or I have done anything "wrong" by selecting a particular brand.

Admittedly, I've had other jobs where this wasn't the case. When I worked for the Cleveland Clinic? I judged those who used any other hospital system, including the excellent University Hospitals of Cleveland. At Vitamix? Yeah, even though those machines are crazy expensive, it caused me physical pain to see people making smoothies in a cheap Oster.

But with tires I'm a little more neutral. Or maybe it's that with age I'm a little more neutral. I want Goodyear to succeed, but I'm not going to think less of anyone whose tires happen to be made by a different company.

Admittedly, my opinion of you is somewhat dampened if I see you wearing a Pittsburgh Steelers jersey. But then I remember it takes all kinds of craziness to make up this world.

I changed all of my passwords, which wasn't fun but I'm glad I did it

For years I used virtually the same password for every website and IT system on which I had an account.

I say "virtually" because sometimes it was just that base password, while other times I added numbers and/or special characters as directed by the site.

But really, once you had discovered one of my passwords, you weren't far from getting to most of them.

Any IT security expert will tell you this is bad. Actually, any 8-year-old will tell you this is bad.

It's one thing to have an easily guessed password when it comes to my ESPN Sportszone account (the worst a hacker could probably do there is switch my "Favorite Team" setting to the Pittsburgh Steelers, which while horrifying and morally wrong is still relatively mild). It's another to be using that same password to access your bank accounts.

I keep a list of all of my/our passwords, so I looked it over and changed every one that used that same password and its variations. There were dozens and dozens and dozens of instances. It took a few hours over a couple of days to get through them all.

In some cases I not only had to go through the password changing process on the website itself, but also log out and log back in to the associated app if it's something I use on my phone.

All (and I mean all) of my passwords are now unique and full of words, numbers, and characters that likely mean something only to me. Or they mean nothing at all.

That way, should one password be compromised in an all-too-common data breech, none of the others will be threatened.

If you're someone who uses the same password and close variations of it over and over, I suggest you go through a similar process. It's a little tedious, but it's safer.

And you'll feel like an actual responsible adult. Even at age 51, there's something to be said for that.