So, about a week and a half ago, mom and I switched internet providers, and then after the technician had done the set-up, we realized he had forgotten to set up my mom's computer.
This led to me spending the better part of 2 days trying to get help to set things up by phone.
But today, I asked someone at a store belonging to the provider, and he showed me what I needed to do - there was a password on the bottom of the tower I needed to put in.
So when I went home, I tried it, and then realized what my mistake had been - I had been putting in the password in all caps, and it was in all lowercase.
with that fixed, it worked and my mom is now safely hooked up.
Now, some may say this doesn't seem like that big a deal, but the last few days I have been fighting a growing sense of failure as I couldn't seem to solve such an easy problem.
So getting it done feels like a victory worth celebrating.
Comments
Just think...
That male brain is fighting against female brain making you think of failure.
Those Bloody Passwords
It's the computer that's the idiot, not you. It never guides you to the solution, just keeps on telling you you're wrong.
Yeaaay Dorothy!
MiXed cAse iN Pa$$w0rds is done on purpose.
Each letter that can be either UPPER or lower case approximately doubles the work an Adversary has do in just guessing. We can also do substitutions: 0/O/oh/o/owe/..., 2/to/two/too, s/$, 8/ate, 4/for/four, ...
So we can remember a password as "give four to Mom", and then remember to type it as "gIve4twoM0m".
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Two 'bad-uns':
One time I had leave a phone message to my coworkers of "the password is 'cueball'". Sigh. They were all programmers, not pool/billiards players. None of them broke free from 'queueball' or 'queball'...
Another time, told my Wife the password was "Navaho". Took her too long to figure out that didn't know (back then) how to spell the name of the Dine, the southwestern Native American Nation, also known as the Navajo ...
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Computers, "Bah, Humbug!" in general.
In a Master's-level computer class, the instructor related how another Computer Science Professor took >two hours< to connect a computer to a printer. All but myself laughed. I already knew that such a setup is either 5 minutes, or >at least< two hours ...
Working for a telephone company, we had a new product, where customers could collect data over a modem. Except for the part of 'cannot connect' to modem. At one point, I found myself, lying on my belly, with a screwdriver on one hand, and a protocol analyzer (think oscilloscope) next to me, asking a question. (Oh, and this was in Chicago's Regional telephone switching hub...)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BDUK_Broadband_(14626513882).jpg (Sorry. You'll have add that "_(14626513882).jpg" to the place the link sends you. This center? Yeah, pretty much...)
My question was ">WHAT< is a >Programmer< doing Here???"
But I was the first person to pull data over the wire for the project. One essential job skill I used was being able to whistle at 1200 baud into an acoustic modem ...
Passwords... the bane of computer users.
Oh for the good old days when I simply turned on the computer and pushed the IPL button and wait the 90 seconds for the OS to load. Then I only had to enter a string of characters (about 20) to call the program and two or more drivers for any program I had loaded on the computer.
This was all before the internet. Back when a 4.7 mHz chip speed was standard and before the PC XT bumped that up to a smoking 12 mHz.
These days, I turn on the computer wait for the splash screen to load, enter a four digit pin number and wait again for the wallpaper to load. Then thanks to the efforts of the great prophet Bill Gates, I have access to Al Gore's information super highway. There in is the bane raises it's ugly head.
It wouldn't be so bad if I only needed a couple of passwords. (Back in the day, I only used two. A complex one that I used for any site that might involve money; banks, and online retailers and another for any silly site I might visit that required me to login. I lived in bliss for a couple of years. Oh yeah, there was the possibility of identity theft. But my thought on it was to worry about that, you needed an identity worth stealing. Back then my identity and a five dollar bill would get you a latte in any coffee shop in town.
Then I switched to Firefox for a browser and liked it much better than Netscape or Internet Explorer. It was about that time I switched from paper checks to paying bills online and the full extent of the bane hit. I now need a total of 12 unique passwords just for the bills. Add to that the passwords for my three email accounts and two websites that require a login. Thanks to the "remembered" passwords feature of Firefox, I have to have 17 unique passwords.
To facilitate remembering them. I have them in a Word file on an encrypted flash-drive. What a pain in the rear.
Oh, I forgot, I need a password for my WiFi and my Fiber Modem so make that 19 passwords. No, make that 20... I need one for my encrypted flash-drive and it can't be stored with the others. I have to remember it. Lord help me if I forget it.
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
Encrypted flash drives are old hat.
You want real security, you use this thing called "paper."
--It's never connected to the internet
--Nobody ever thinks to check for it
--Easily portable and recoverable
--Can be encrypted by hand
--Is encrypted by default, if your handwriting is bad enough
--Resistant to all digital infiltration techniques
Its main shortcomings is that someone can physically take it from you and it's easily damaged by water... but, I mean, the same can be said of the flash drive.
Melanie E.
encrypted
Since I write in cursive, even with great penmanship, it'd more than likely be encrypted for anyone under the age of 40. It's the senior citizen coded language. ;o)
My problem is that the list is long enough (and growing) I would likely need to recopy it on a new larger piece of paper a couple of times a year. The advantage of keeping it digital, is that I can use cut and past to enter it on all but two of the sites I need pass words on.
It used to be that a six character password was sufficient, but now most sites require more than eight. So most of my passwords are somewhere in the teens. The more characters,the greater the chance of miskeying the password. The sites where I really feel I need a solid password (my bank for example) don't offer a "show" option. If I miskey the password three times in a row, I'm locked out for 24 hours and my email lights up with notices about someone trying to hack my account and then they demand that I set a new password, even though the "hacker" was unsuccessful.
The flash drive resides in a drawer full of spare USB cables and various adapters (most of which qualify for junk that should have been thrown away three computers ago).
Hugs
Patricia
Happiness is being all dressed up and HAVING some place to go.
Semper in femineo gerunt
Ich bin eine Mann
Multiple passwords
I solve that problem with a password management program, which generates pseudo-random passwords and stores them. There is a default complexity, but some sites require even more (upper case letters, lower case letters, symbols, AND (rather than or) numbers), and you can adjust the complexity and number of characters as needed. There are many such programs available. I use KeePass (https://keepass.info/), which is free and lightweight, and can either be installed on your hard disk or on a thumb drive, useful if you use more than one computer.