Remembering Passwords

I don't save my passwords.  That is to say, if I log into a site, I don't let my browser remember the password.  Neither do I use one of those programs that will generate random passwords and remember them for you, and log you into things automatically.

Two reasons are the core of why I go this route:  1) it forces me to actually remember my passwords, and 2) if I step away from my computer and somehow forget to lock it, unless I'm already logged in somewhere, someone can't just walk up and get to say my bank information.

I don't know, from a security standpoint, if this is ultimately the best way to go, but from the standpoint of logging into a site somewhere else - on my phone, my laptop, the reference desk computer - I don't have to try to guess at most of my passwords.

On computers at work, I go one step further and wipe the history/cookies every time I close a browser.  It's also why, despite how convenient it is to log into Chrome and have all my bookmarks and such right there, I won't log into Chrome on a work computer:  it's too hard to get your profile information out of Chrome again.  Google doesn't recommend signing in on public computers, which is a shame, because that synchronized data is so handy.  I make myself remember my passwords, but I bookmark things so I don't have to remember.

And that's probably the biggest reason I'm still using Firefox over Chrome at the moment - if I could sign in and then out of Chrome at work and it wouldn't keep my profile, I'd probably switch.  As it is, I've got no reason to.  Upside: I usually remember my passwords.  Downside: I don't always remember the site to use them at.

Surnames

So, yeah. I grew up with an uncommon surname. How uncommon? How Many of Me suggests that there are 115 or fewer people with it in the United States. Geogen suggests fewer than 50 in Germany, where it originated.

Which leads to the pondering. I changed my name when I got married, without really thinking much about it (other than, woohoo, my name will fit in standardized bubble forms now!). My married name (Brent, if you haven't figured that out) is more common than my maiden name, but not terribly common. (It is not, in fact, my husband's family's original name, nor was the name they had before that. A fascinating evolution in self-identity, but not one I was involved in. My great-great-grandfather, on the other hand, got pissed off at relatives and flipped two vowels in the name so that he would somehow no longer be related to them. Similar, I suppose, to how the Donner I am named after was from a family who pronounced it "Dunner" to somehow not be associated with the (reputedly distant cousins) Donners who met with misfortune in the Sierra Nevada.)

Anywho, nine years later, I ran into Blizzard's RealID/real names on their forums brouhaha (having, of course, a World of Warcraft account and occasionally posting on the forums). My name isn't terribly common - you wouldn't have to go through a lot of people with my name to eventually find me. But with my maiden name? You don't need to guess. And then if you know that I have relatives who play, they're not too hard to extrapolate.

So that leads to the thinking... how identifiable does one want to be, online or otherwise? If I'm going to publish, would it have been better to do so under my maiden name, which will be immediately and unmistakably identifiable? On the other hand, is having that buffer of a dozen or so people if someone psychotic tries to look me up more valuable? (And the flip side - which is more likely: publishing something, or having a psychotic stalker?)

Minimalism

I'm finding, as the web evolves, that I abhor clutter on a website. It's actually part of what decides if I keep using a site's services or if I go elsewhere. Examples:

• CNN.com won out over MSNBC.com when the latter changed their layout and began using those irritating 'mouseover expanding' menus.
• MySpace lost hands-down before I even started using Facebook.
• I can't stand Google's homepage if I log in and add widgets - it's plain, or not at all. (Honestly, though, for most of what I go to the web to find out, I just go to Wikipedia. I use Google for entirely different things than I use Wikipedia, but that's a whole 'nother discussion.)

AdBlock Plus and Flashblock are, after NoScript, my most favored and beloved of addons. (Sure, Zotero is fantastic, but not for making my every day web browsing better.)

I can't bring myself to get behind Flash- and/or image-heavy web design. Give me text, darn it. I'm a heavy user of 'search as you type' in Firefox - I want to be able to find what I'm looking for by typing it as I'm thinking it. And the accessibility issues? Argh.

But, yeah. I tend to prefer clean, crisp designs. No excessive Flash; organizationally tidy; colors are aesthetically pleasing and facilitate reading. If your site is too distracting to use, I'm giong to go find something with approximately equivalent content that I find either easier to use or less hectic to dig through.

I would expect it shows in the themes I choose for blogs and the design of my own sites.

Ooo, pretties

I was fiddling around in Google maps today, looking at the area around Valley Forge (we'll be there tomorrow or Sunday), and I clicked the "More..." button on the map.  To my surprise, there was a checkbox for Wikipedia in there.  Clicking the checkbox adds gazillions of little "W" links to the map - Wikipedia entries pertaining to that location.  (There were three or four in Valley Forge national park, if I recall correctly.)

Right, right...  I'm a librarian; Wikipedia should be anathema to me.  But I love it.  Not for research - I'm fond of EBSCO and, when I have access to them, some of the historical databases for that.  I use Wikipedia the way I used Google five years ago - it's my search and discovery tool.  Putting it on the map directly?  Now I don't even have to open a new tab in Firefox to do what I was going to do anyway!

Sure, there are some searches I still go to Google for first - the website of a national organization, or voter registration information for New York, for example.  But if I want to know about hedges?  It's off to Wikipedia.