I have refrained from ranting about various problems I’ve had with my new AT&T service and Samsung SGH-a517 phone. After spending a year ranting about Sprint and canceling Verizon after a day, I figure the problem starts sound like it’s with me if I hate AT&T as well. I’m not going to post about the service or the phone.

I’m trying to research my problems with the service and the phone on the AT&T wireless forums. My hiccup:

Password: must contain at least one uppercase character. Your password must be 6 or more characters, contain at least one lowercase character, one uppercase character, one digit, and no repeated sequence of 3 or more characters. Your password can’t be a subset of your login name.

As I mentioned a few months back with regard to the Target RedCard site, I’ve got a standard scheme for picking passwords for sites, and I think my passwords are pretty secure. When I’m liable to compromise my passwords’ security is when I must change my scheme because of one site’s stringent rules implemented for my own good. That’s when I have to either write down the password or send myself an email or put the damn password anywhere other than in my brain.

So, my super-secure scheme doesn’t happen to include an uppercase character. I hope that by ranting about this now, I’ll have a permanent reminder to myself that my AT&T wireless forum password is the one password that has an uppercase character. Not sure which character I’ll make uppercase. I’ll make the first character uppercase.

I think that instead of worrying about making password rules up, websites should simply have an extra box along with all the other terms and conditions I don’t read that says, “We are not responsible for any damage caused to your life because you picked a dumb password’. And then if I want my password to be “toastie” or “password” or “blank” or just plain blank, that’s my right.