Great article, John.
I use LastPass plugin for Firefox to remember my hundreds of passwords. As far as creating passwords, I've written several articles on the topic. One good method is simply to come up with a meaningful phrase and then convert it a string of characters. Here?s one: I drive 33 miles round-trip each day. (Notice I included numbers and a dash.) That could become id33mr-ted. Make some of the characters uppercase: iD3#mR-TeD (I made every other character uppercase ? easy to remember). You get the idea.
You can check out one of my main articles "How to Write Down Your Passwords and Not Worry About Anyone Stealing Them" at
http://bit.ly/106ha9 .