Tag Archives: password

What’s the password for your passwords

A few weeks ago I took some days off and went to Utah for a little skiing with friends. I skied two days at Powder Mountain and one at Snowbasin it was a great time. I can’t remember when ski rental and lift tickets were $70 a day, hopefully I can get back there again soon. It was one trip I didn’t take my laptop, just my Nokia 810. It worked pretty well but the wifi was not the best where we were staying, so I suppose taking the laptop would have been moot anyway.

When I got home I needed to check a few things, most importantly pay some bills. This is where I ran into a problem. I use KeePass to store all my usernames and passwords as well as letting it generate a password for me, there are some rare exceptions. It is an excellent program and has served me well over the years. For access it requires a password and when I got back from my trip, since I had not used it for a while, I forgot the password. It was actually kind of funny at the time, here I was using an application that encrypts and stores passwords that I couldn’t get into cause I forgot my password !!!.

All was not lost I really did know the password, just couldn’t remember the right combination. I did find it, made a clear text copy and put it in a secure place… just in case. I’ve debated for a while on changing my philosophy, in case something like this happens, but just haven’t done it yet. Of the various methods out there the one I like the most is keep passwords written down or in a text file somewhere easily accessible but what’s recorded is incomplete. Yes just writing the true password down would not be that secure. The theory is a unique sequence of characters, easily remembered by you but not common to your identity, in the beginning middle or end of password completes it. That way you have the 8, 10, 12, etc characters that one can’t remember for the 20 or 30 accounts written down but you and only you know what’s missing to complete the password.

Maybe one of these days I’ll do that.