Online accounts: The name of the rose?

I was never 'tech savvy', rather I never liked to be one. Of course, I knew what the 'in-thing's were but never liked to be part of it. In my college days, creating email accounts were 'big'. For one, we had to pay for 'browsing' and also I am not a 'surfer'. Unless I had some specific purpose, I dont wander around amidst lot of pages. It is natural that I dont know lot of websites. Banking or booking tickets in the net is a necessary evil and I dont avoid that. Already there are too many 'names' and 'passwords' for such account, that I find it ridiculous. There are billions of people in this world and 'raghuraman' is not always available. It was ok till last year when I was able to manage many accounts with a simple (some would say silly) password and good memory. Creating these 'tough' passwords is a NP-complete problem for me :o It is amusing therefore when others created accounts for me!

I have a lot of 'hangover'. So the accounts that I create on my own are most often college or employee ids. I use 'a0756945', 'maa9716', '1015' (if I dont get raghuraman or raghuraman.r)! My passwords are even more ridiculous. It used to be rcube or rrr and it was good then. Now all websites, especially banking ones, want us to have one password with one capital letter, one special character and all that nonsense :( When I was in Texas Instruments, there used to be one system which will generate passwords and we had to just choose. I used to love that because it relieves me of a 'big problem' ;)

I think the first problem happened when a person created an email id 'raghuramthegreat' in yahoo out of 'whatever' :( It is not in my nature to 'naturally' hurt and so I used that id for sometime. I read her 'so well' that she also used to login to see if I am using :( I dont know how but this id 'spread' to few others as well and I was not amused when one MBA guy in my college mentioned the same in front of my class. I couldnt shrug it off like Atlas, atleast till some years ago. I thought I am 'relieved' but the bogie is continuing. I never liked facebook (because it is popular in US?) and one guy has created an id all the same using my picture in Orkut. I dont know why people dont mind their own business :( He has put my date of birth as 14 April 1970 and one of the photos from orkut as well! I dont know if I look 'so old' but the unkindest cut was my name was given as 'Raghuraman Ramaprasadh'! Who is Ramaprasadh? I could have well ignored this 'id' but changing my father's name forces me to intervene.

To hell with all these accounts.