Take all the printable/allowable characters and create a random string with them. The longer the string the better your password.

IMHO, the worst password is most likely "password"

>Take all the printable/allowable characters and create a random
>string with them. The longer the string the better your password.
That's the logic for a secure password. A good password is sufficiently secure while still being memorable. Logic for a good password would be a phrase that meets the requirements for a strong password but is easy to remember:

"My favorite number is 23728. How about that?"

Upper and lower case letters, numbers, and punctuation combined into 44 characters is definitely considered a strong password.

You are of course correct, Narue.

I often take my birthyear and center it with my favorite food. Something like "19kumquat84"

I often use the same base password, then each account has its own variation.

One summer job I had they forced you to change your password once a week. So I simply took my GF's name and added each starting Monday's date to it.

Thanks I was wondering how to hack you...

Seriously, I take a phrase that expresses a personal feeling about the thing I', signing up for, then I do something strange with it. Like pop the vowels and convert the whitespace to dots, or change all t to 7 or something totally retarded but retainable at the same time...

this post reminded me of good times

That said, the easy-to-remember is important and not a word is important. Another example I've seen is taking something like "4 score and 7 years" and turning it into 4s&7y, or using mixing in some 1337, so that awesomepassword becomes 4w3$0m3|>a5$w0rd.

There's also ongoing research into alternates to text-based passwords, such as using a sequence of images (e.g. given 9, select the correct one, and have a sequence of, say 4), or using inkblots to help users remember strong passwords.

123456 is rather common aswell.

Here are some ideal passwords I have used in the past...

password
passwordhere
robmeblindcosiamsuchanoob

And some not so great ones...

random numbers and letters (how will you remember (Are you getting this Infarction?))
your date of birth (if on a time machine: it might change)
willy (not long enough, well at least in not for you!)