The joys of password security

I go through phases of how to handle password security. When my AMEX had a fraudulent charge on it (I think it was just an honest mistake of someone giving the wrong credit card number, although it did show me the weaknesses of credit card security) I generated random, alphanumeric passwords for every account I owned. That is a lot of accounts and a lot of passwords. Granted I learned the ones I use frequently, but the ones I didn't I had to always look up.

Then I did the phrases thing. All of my new passwords were phrases of some form or another that I came up with on the spot. But that was not the most secure thing in the world compared to randomly generated alphanumeric passwords.

And so I have compromised. I now use only alphanumeric passwords for all of my accounts, but I have consolidated the number of passwords I have. There is a slight tweak to the important ones that have similar brethren when it comes to the password, but it is non-obvious how the passwords vary. I have also kept unique alphanumeric passwords for the accounts that truly matter to me in terms of identity.

Anyway. I am fairly happy with this setup. Now I only have to memorize eight alphanumeric passwords which is a lot more manageable compared to the roughly 15 I had before.