Confessions of a Fugitive Mind
April 12, 2007
Passwords
I hate having to change my password at work. While I understand that it is supposed to improve security, it means I have one more string of characters to commit to memory. And there are enough in there already. I have a few standards that I use over and over, depending on how complex the password for each account must be. But every few months I have to come up with another. And I can't repeat any of my last six.
That's right, six. Sadly, I don't have six standard passwords. So now I have to start making things up. The only saving grace is that the qualifications are nowhere near as strict as WPI's six to nine character, must contain a lowercase and uppercase letter, a number, a symbol, your first born child, and the first and last characters do not count toward the requirements. The letters were also not supposed to spell any word found in the dictionary. Those were wicked hard to remember.
I still think it helps to keep things simple. When I go to log in to an account I haven't accessed in ages, I know that if my most frequently used password doesn't work, one of two or three others probably will. Same with usernames. I'm lucky enough to have just two that work almost everywhere. It just pains me to have to remember more.
Posted by criminal at April 12, 2007 9:47 AM
Comments
When I had to do that at my last job, I first set my password to pi3.14 (min six characters, letters, numbers, and punctuation). Next change, it was pi3.141, then pi3.1415, and so on. This way, at least I had some idea what my current password was.
Posted by: xine at April 15, 2007 7:47 PM