I have a "universal" work password, plus 4 other passwords, 2 of which change not in sync with one another. Plus my personal stuff, of course. It is to argh.

Also, drilling cement and pounding on metal pipes directly under my chair. And just got spam with the subject line "Banana God Room." Hmmm

Is it really practical to exercise security measures when it comes to usernames? I've never worked on a system where they weren't predictable. After all, you often have to look at a user ID and work out whose it is.

It's more the issue of having it that uniform. Even having the options of firstinitial.lastname, lastname.firstinitial, lastnamefirstname, firstnamelastname, etc. all available increase the number of options that an attack has to work through since the username is not a given. Basically an attack now has to try all password options against multiple username options as opposed to just iterating through possible passwords.

I've never worked on a system where they weren't predictable.

In our district, depending on when you were hired, your user id might be totally transparent (first name.last name) or it might be opaque (initials followed by the last four digits of your employee number, which is a number given to you that the correlates to nothing else in your life). It was done like that not for security (I'm quite sure) but for convenience.

Hells, yeah. I watched Spaceballs, Cannonball Run, and Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure while making Christmas cookies this year. I'm surprised the cookies didn't turn into dumb-yet-funny pills.

I got the Bill & Ted's soundtrack for Xmas this year.

Aimee thinks I'm an idiot, but I have fond memories.

I have been at new job for less than a month and I have main login and 5 others for various programs - none are the same and the main changes every 4 weeks, but I think the others stay the same forever.

I am forgetting ones already since I do not use some programs but maybe once/mo.

Today is just ankle biting me to death. the store I wanted to go to at lunch closed last week according to the signs on the windows, then I spilled the fries I bought in an attempt to better my mood. I fully expect to trip and fall before the day is over.

password at work is pretty generic with incremental number increase at the end . I'm not sure my library password needs to change that often. - really I don't do super secret things , but whatever.

They have been repairing streets and sidewalks in my neighborhood. Which often means my street is blocked. Even though I didn't have to go anywhere yesterday, it was making me anxious. Partly because it looks like they are going to have to tear up the street right in front of my drive way. Right now, there is a truck parked across my driveway - happily I parked on the cross street so that I wouldn't have to worry about getting out for work . but it still bugs. if only I had some idea what would happen when - but everything depends on the rain

OMG, you guys, I just hit the secret information jackpot. I often need to know salaries for my job. Usually, I get them one by one from the #2 finance guy. Well, he and the CFO are both out, and I need some info. So I go to this other woman in finance, and she handed me a list of everyone's salary. She said to destroy it when I'm done using it. Yeah right!

...I can't let anyone here know that I have this, so you guys get to know. I didn't know my counterpart makes more than I do!

Basically an attack now has to try all password options against multiple username options as opposed to just iterating through possible passwords.

I cannot contest that. However I think the viability in the field is weak--people are already post-it-noting their passwords to their monitors. I mean, I know my username here is firstnamelastname. At my last job it was the first eight characters of firstnamelastname. That's what I memorised--the structure, not the string itself.

I don't know how the rest of the world works in that respect. But in all my years as a network admin and a user on many corporate networks I've never encountered a policy that mixes it up on the username side--they emphasize the passwords instead.

Today I woke up late, had to take the car in to the shop, participated in a conference call on the shuttle back, and am just out of phase.

I hope your counterpart is not male (nonprofit gender salary bias rant). But now you know what to negotiate on your next review if you are still there.

She is female, and in retrospect, I think she got the (small) bump when review time came around last year and They decided I hadn't worked here long enough for an increase.