Thursday, December 14, 2006

wisdom teeth and remembering passwords

This Monday, I had all four of my wisdom teeth removed. I went the local anesthesia route so I was awake during the procedure while my oral surgeon drilled and pulled at my molars. The main reason I didn't want to be put under was so that I could eat a ton of food before the removal. Even though listening to your teeth crack isn't the most pleasant experience, having a full stomach and not being nauseous afterward is a good trade off. I still can't really chew on food so I've been eating jook, mashed potatoes, and soup for the past few days. Most of the bleeding and pain is gone by day 2 but my cheeks are still pretty swollen. I look like a chipmunk blowing a bubble minus the bubble. I've had a couple of days to rest and so I've been reading, watching tv, surfing the web, and now blogging.

In fact, this entry was triggered by the security breach at reddit.com. A hard drive was stolen and reddit recommends that passwords be changed. Because of the recommendation, commenters assume that the passwords were stored as plain text. Another top story on reddit, was an article on weak passwords written by security guru Bruce Schneier. So what better time that to share how I deal with passwords. For freebie or temp accounts that have no personal info, I use a simple password. For accounts that need better security, I remember one main password and then use that main password and a unique key that is based on the web url and some other string to generate a password. I use this standalone, javascript password generator which I have saved on my local machine.

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