Creating Secure Passwords

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My screensaver is a slide show of funny sayings. One of them says, "Sorry, your password must contain a capital letter, two numbers, a symbol, an inspiring message, a spell, a gang sign, a hieroglyph and the blood of a virgin." Whilst that is of course an exaggeration, sometimes meeting the requirements for password creation can be truly frustrating. Eight characters? Sixteen characters? Include a special character? No special characters? And it's made even worse when your bank or some other secure site tells you it's time to change your password, and demands that you do it RIGHT NOW before it will let you in. Often the immediate reaction is brain freeze. We know we need secure passwords. And we know we should not use the same one for all our accounts. But with so many passwords needed, how do we create different ones, and how can we remember them all? Here's a trick I use. Start off with a simple little address book (don't ever keep passwords on your computer.) Now choose any book in your house - it can be a novel, a cook book, a manual of some kind - anything at all as long as it has words arranged in sentences. When you need a new password, open at a random page, and choose a random line of text on the page. Use the first letter of each word up to the number of characters you need, changing words like "a" "to" and "for" into numbers. In your address book, note down ONLY the name of the site that the password is for, and the page and line. Take your passwords from the same book every time, then all you need to do to find them is look up the page and line that you have recorded in your address book.