This morning, our server had all of us change our passwords, so I spent part of the portion of the day helping people reset their passwords. The thing is, our servers remember our previous passwords -- or at least the last 24 passwords. Our password policy is a little more evil than that in that you cannot have subwords repeated so if I used walk, I could not use walks, walker or skywalker. Eventually, you do run out of things that you can remember as passwords, and you start trying to come up with an absurdly long list of things that have some sense to them that you can use as a password.
One person suggested favorite superheroes -- but you'd start forgetting after about the 7th or 8th one (although I do know people who could come up with a fairly good list, but the trick is not coming up with them, it's remembering the order for future reference). For a long time, my password was MacGyver. Not a super strong password (though the addition of punctuation marks or numbers could make it a bit stronger) but because it had different capitalization, and it wasn't something you'd find in a dictionary. After all these years, he's still my favorite fictional hero.
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