Keeping passwords safe

I remember the first time my mother and father started locking the doors of our house, back in 1963. (I think it was just coincidental it was also the year of President Kennedy's assassination.) Up to that time, the house had always stood unlocked, and as a young kid I couldn't understand why we now had to start locking it. I had a brief return to those days of innocence when I spent two years in what is now Vanuatu, on Volunteer Service Abroad. Crime was almost non-existent there in those days and I didn't even bother shutting the door, let alone lock it. My flat was across the road from the prison, which was surrounded by a low hedge, and the front door stood open all day long. Prisoners were used for public works around the town, and each day you would see them taking their constable out for his daily walk. He would proceed to lay down in the shade and go to sleep while they, armed with machetes, would happily slash the grass around him and do their bit for the community. Most of these men were in prison for wife-beating (a national sport at the time) or drunkenness, but seeing they didn't get drink in prison were perfectly safe. How I long for such crime-free times again.
Sadly, locks, passwords, and multiple layers of security are utterly vital these days, even more so in the digital world. I seem to have hundreds of logins and passwords for the many websites I visit in the course of work, and keeping track of these is a job. Some people use the same password for everything, but it poses the danger that if it is stolen or cracked, the intruders have access to every detail of your life. Keeping passwords secure is even more problematic. The worst thing you could do would be to write them on bits of paper (although I have been guilty of that on occasion). Better is to copy them into a Word document, and then password protect the document. Even better is to keep them inside password-storing software, and I have just started to use a simple open-source applicaton called Password Safe. Password Safe allows you to safely and easily create a secured and encrypted user name/password list - all you have to do is create and remember a single "Master Password" of your choice in order to unlock and access your entire user name/password list.