On the weekends, it was routine for me to hop on my bike once my chores were done and just take off. The rule was just had to be home by dinner time, or call from whichever friends house I was at if I couldn’t make it back in time. No cell phones.

I’ve been seriously considering picking up a trumpet and starting a ska band with some of my other middle aged friends just for shits and giggles. Seems like a lot of fun.

I’m on the older side of being a millennial. When I was in highschool (late '90s early 2k), guidance counselors were absolutely telling kids to just get any college degree they could and there’d be a job waiting for them when they graduated.

On the other hand if they didn’t get a degree they’d be losers working jobs like having to be a garbage man and or would probably end up as homeless drug addicted losers.

You’re thinking of American Samoa which is different from the Independent State of Samoa, formerly known as Western Samoa and a sovereign nation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samoa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Samoa

I always made sure I had Thomas guide book for any areas I went through in my car.

For anyone unfamiliar with the source.

https://archive.org/stream/i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream_202202/I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream_djvu.txt

You are correct.

For anyone else unaware, the schtick of the account was they’d always rate dogs with ratings of x/10 with x always being greater than 10. It was pretty funny how often people would get upset over this.

What you want is NIST 800-63b https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html#memsecret

Specifically sections 5.1.1.1 and 5.1.1.2.

Excerpt from 5.1.1.2 pertaining to complexity and rotation requirements:

Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets. Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.

Appendix A of the document contains their reasoning for changing from the previous common wisdom.

The tl;dr of their changes boil down to length is more important than any other factor when it comes to password security.

Edit to add:

In my personal opinion, organizations should be trying to move away from passwords as much as possible. If your IT team seems to think this system is so important that they need to rotate passwords every month, they should probably be transitioning to hardware security tokens, passkeys, or worst case, password with non-sms MFA.

Now I know nothing about the actual circumstances and I know there are plenty of reasons why that may not be possible in this specific case, but I’d feel remiss if I didn’t mention it.

Any organization still doing this is a decade behind best practices. NIST published new recommendations years ago that specified getting rid of the practice of regular forced password resets specifically because they encourage bad practices that make passwords weaker.

Of course it doesn’t help that there are some industry compliance standards that have refused to update their requirements, but I don’t know of any that would require monthly password changes.

My sister actually gave my daughter this book when she was young. I thought it was good stuff.

https://www.akpress.org/aisforactivist.html

Real answer for anyone curious, he’s using one of these.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigil

They’re about raising the sarcophagus. Those things can be heavy.

One of my favorite T-shirts. https://www.teepublic.com/t-shirt/23763923-utc-or-gtfo

(I am not affiliated in any way with this shop)

One of the best bosses I ever had once told me that people will stay for the culture but leave for money. His philosophy was to try and ensure that money was not a factor in people’s decision, then build as good a culture as he could.

And to be clear, by making money not a factor, I mean he paid well.