User names and passwords

I think I'm reaching the saturation point when it comes to user names and passwords. I say this because I experienced an incident of computer rage last week, and I was the one doing the raging! Me. Middle-aged, mild-mannered Dee. It happened when I tried to join Twitter.

“It’s your turn. Join Twitter.” This was the cheerful greeting on  Twitter's "Create an Account" web page. I started by typing in user names that reflected my real name but kept getting the message “X This user name is already taken!” After a dozen failed attempts, I found myself entering expletives that frustrated, irate drivers would scream out their car windows at offending fellow motorists! Somewhere in the back of my mind I wondered if the Internet police would suddenly revoke my access privileges, but I was beyond caring. And with every profane entry I made, the same infuriating message appeared - “X This user name is already taken!”

I finally changed my tactics. Abandoning profanity for cynicism, I entered the user name “crowsdonttweet” and received the happy news, “User name is available.” Shortening the name to “crowsdont,” I finished off my Twitter profile with a photo of an American crow cawing, and shut down my computer with smug satisfaction.

I suspect my angry outburst stemmed from the increasing complexity of maintaining an online presence while successfully avoiding cyber crooks. A couple of months back, it took me many tries to generate a password deemed strong enough to be acceptable on WordPress. We’re not talking about a bank website. I was just joining a blog for middle-aged women discussing Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way! 

Password security experts now recommend that you don’t use dictionary words in any language. Think about that for a moment. It’s a remarkably sweeping restriction. In addition, they caution against using words spelled backwards, common misspellings, and abbreviations. Using personal information is, of course, a rookie mistake. And, once you’ve devised passwords stronger than the vaults at Fort Knox, be prepared to scrap them and generate new ones every three months!

A quick count tells me I’ve got at least twenty online log-ins. I wonder if the experts have any advice on how I’m supposed to remember all my non-mnemonic, ever-changing passwords, not to mention all those user names that bear no resemblance to my real name. My tech-savvy son would probably say, “Mom, there’s an app for that.”

You can find more information about impenetrable passwords and other computer security tips on the Microsoft website.

Favourite websites

The assigned topic for this post is favourite websites. I need to comment knowledgeably on two of them. The problem is, while I use websites for things like online banking, looking up movie show times, doing research for assignments, reserving library books, and registering for courses, I don’t think of them in terms of favourites. I really only take notice of a website when there’s something wrong with it.

What do I consider wrong in terms of websites? Here are a few pet peeves:

• advertising that flashes incessantly
• links that don’t work
• links that open a separate web browser
• sites that force you to navigate by clicking on "back"
• sites that require horizontal scrolling
•  sites that don’t provide the information users are expecting to find
•  sites that aren’t user-friendly or intuitive
•  sites that fail to balance usability with visual appeal (see website usability guru Jakob Nielsen’s site for example)

It’s too bad Google isn’t a website. I could go on and on about the virtues of my favourite search engine – the elegant simplicity of its design, the variety of search categories, the "define" and "synonym" search features, the "did you mean?" feature that compensates for fumble-fingered typists and people who can’t spell, the inventive banner redesigns commemorating special occasions, the … well, you see what I mean.