New year, new job, new tech

It's not just the beginning of the school year for elementary and secondary students. It's also the start of a new year for me, as I'm going into my last full year as a master's student.

When I'm not going to school, I will be working as a telehealth nurse coordinator, to bring the benefits of telehealth technology to spinal cord injury/dysfunction patients throughout our service area. Telehealth is a global term which basically encompasses delivering health care via technology, whether it is via telephone, secure video conferencing or even text messaging.

Finally, this is a very exciting area of healthcare. I hope to learn more and pass it on.

The drought is over...

I'm hoping it is anyway! Greetings to all!

I'm happy to say I'm alive and kicking and busy, busy, busy as an informatics grad student. Hopefully, by this time next year, I'll be well into completing my last year.

Anyway, there are so many interesting things I could talk about, but this news item today in the New York Times about RSA SecureIDs nearly stopped me in my tracks. I used one of these for quite some time and yes, multifactor authentication is the way to go for logins, but this is scary.

Remember to use complex passwords and rotate them on a regular basis. If your system allows it, use special characters (note: these may be limited), numbers, as well as both upper and lower case letters. Also, do not use words commonly found in the dictionary or things easily found out about you (i.e. your address, phone number, birth date, etc.)

If necessary, create your own rotating password and vary the special characters and caps every three months or however necessary.

As they used to say on one old police show, "Let's be careful out there!"