Saturday, September 12, 2009

PASSWORDS!





My life is filled with passwords. I may be required to use them, but I am such a creature of habit. Recently I have tried to follow the advice of my friend, Mark, who is our school's computer technician. He has repeatedly told me that I should use a password that includes a variety of lower and upper case, numbers and letters. I have failed miserably for the last 12 years to fulfill his wishes.

A couple of years ago, Mark was leading a computer inservice for our school district and using the LCD to demonstrate. He said he would log into this particular program as a teacher to lead the discussion. He typed in my name, hesitated, while staring at the screen and promptly entered my password on the first attempt. One faculty member was shocked and asked how do you know Coach Weaver's password. He replied, "I had a one out of two chance, and it was his cat."

You won't get into our bank account though. When I was setting up our online account, I was asked a series of questions. I guess I didn't pay attention to what they were asking and the first time Chris was logging she kept missing the answers. I had supplied several right answers to the wrong questions. Now that, my friends is security. Example: my maternal grandmothers' first name is not Chris' grandmother.............I guess since Chris is Mom at our home I thought........................................oh , never mind.

This year I have become an improved, computer savvy user of encrypted security. It's not working very well. I am just like the freshmen at our high school, who are issued a combination locker and then tape the combination to their locker. How do I remember all of these passwords? I keep getting frustrated, embarrassed, and even locked out of accounts. I feel like a criminal. Then I had an epiphany. No one wants into anything that I have anyway! I don't need this. Sorry, Mark!


It's the cat!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Here's a simple way to come up with a strong password that's easy to remember. Think of a line from your favorite movie, or favorite song and use the first letter of each word along with the punctuation. For example, let's say you want to use the famous line from Dirty Harry, "Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?" Using the first letter of each word plus punctuation you get:

DIfl?W,dy,p?

Now that's a tough password! You have upper-case, lower-case and punctuation all in an easy-to-remember package. Try it with your own favorite line.

Kevin said...

Wow, Mark, what a great idea!! (Not!) Glad you are blogging again. It's the cat!