With how easily passwords are being broken, many companies have policies requiring “strong” passwords. By this, they mean that they want upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers and punctuation. How is anyone supposed to remember such a creation?

It’s easy, honest. I’ve gotten elementary teachers addicted to creating new passwords. (Scary, no?) Here, try a couple examples.

Think of a song that you like. I’m going to choose “I Know Whom I Have Believed” by Daniel Whittle (the music was by James McGranahan, just in case you are wondering). Every vowel (except ‘u’ and ‘y’, which aren’t in this title) can be replaced by a number:

1 Kn0w Wh0m 1 H4v3 B3l13v3d

Now if we replace the spaces with, say, the @ symbol:

1@Kn0w@Wh0m@1@H4v3@B3l13v3d

I dare someone to guess that password. Now let’s pretend that we have a friend who lives at 1234 SW Hampton St. with a zip code of 98765. How hard would it be to convert the zip to alphabetical letters?:

1234 SW Hampton St. gBTGs [98765]

Take the initials from the street name and make the zip code lower-case:

1234 SW H S gbtgs

Now remove the spaces and add an exclamation point to the end:

1234SWHSgbtgs!

It looks horrible but really isn’t too hard to remember. What you do from here is up to you. You can use book titles, a friend’s phone number, the address of the white house or even the names of songs you hate. Be creative. Then be careful not to type in these passwords at the wrong website. Verify the URL in the address bar first.

Just in case you are wondering, neither of these is a password I actually use. I’m a bibliophile so there are over three hundred book titles in my room for you to choose from just to get started. That ignores any movie titles, song names, vacation spots I’ve been to, etc. Then you would have to guess what punctuation I use. To make it even harder, sometimes I only change every other vowel into a number. Or capitalize letters at certain places in the words. You get the idea, you’ll be typing for the next 5 years just to guess one of my passwords.

Now go have some fun with making your own.