Password Expiry Horror

My password was due to expire on Tuesday, so I have had to go through the fun process of setting a new one. Oh what joy. I personally liked the old password, using it on almost everything. Perhaps that's not particularly safe, but I don't have anything particularly worth breaking into. Plus it was easy to remember, but hard to crack. It wasn't based on dictionary words, but was mutated far too much to be guessed by a brute force attack.

Sadly, UWA force us to all change our passwords once a year, and so my nice old password had to go. The only problem with this is that they also impose some excessivle tight security on the kind of password you are allowed to choose. It will try to match anything you enter against a massive collection of dictionaries, will not accept anything that happens to vaguely resemble a number plate or various other criteria. I tried various new passwords.

The first was too short. "Unix/Windows password must contain between 6 and 14 characters". Okay, fair enough.

The second was matched against a dictionary. "Unix/Windows password unsuitable because it is based on a German dictionary word". So, let me get this straight... The Germans have a word which is made up of letters and numbers, and that also has a dirty great big @ in the middle of it? Those Germans. What will they do next?

Third and fourth passwords were "unsuitable because it is like one of your existing passwords". That was fair enough. I was being cheeky and choosing passwords that were vaguely like my original password.

Fifth password was rejected for being based on a dictionary word. By that I assume they meant an English word, which was a load of crap. There is certainly no word in English that looks anything like the password I put in.

The sixth password was rejected for the same reason, but I can't remember what I entered for this one. Suffice to say that I never use actual words for my passwords, so it can't be true.

My seventh password contained a space. "Unix/Windows password must be a mixture of letters, digits and !@#:?<>,./;'`[]=-\&()0^*_+{}~|" only". Silly me. Wouldn't want to confuse the system now would I? Removing the space resulted in...

Password number 8: "Unix/Windows password unsuitable because it is based on a Welsh dictionary word

Please choose a different password." Not at all true. The removal of a number gave me...

Password 9: "Password changed for mtl1". So it wasn't based on a Welsh word at all really, was it? Unless there is a Welsh word that has a number in the middle of it. Which, as we all know, is perfectly common. All well, the password is changed. Hurrah! Now to start trying to remember the bastard thing.

Newbury

Back from Newbury after a nice weekend with Liz. Not a lot to report other than we did a 15 mile walk on the Saturday. My legs hated me for it. Liz's Pedomoter registered the walk as 13.9 miles. This couldn't have been accurate though, because we walked most of the way to Great Shefford and then stopped to see how far we had come. 7.5 miles, according to the Pedomoter. We then walked back along exactly the same route and it claimed we had only walked 13.9.

7.5

x 2

-----

15.0

-----

15.0 != 13.9

15.0

- 13.9

------

1.1

------

An inaccuracy of 1.1 miles...hmmm. I meant to check the actual distance on the map but a combination of utter knackerdnedd and forgetfulness prevented that from happening.

The walk showed me just how out of shape I am at the moment. Once upon a time that would have been tiring, yes, but not a killer like it was on Saturday. I was so shattered by the time we got back that I couldn't put weight on my feet.

A few years ago I did a similar length walk up and down the Derbyshire hills, and still had enough energy to play crazy Wide Games in the evening immediately after.