I'm an expert at creating strong passwords. Sure wish I could remember them too.

Nothing scares me more than Identity Theft. (Well, not as much as getting sucked out of a fuselage mid-flight, but certainly up there in overall worries.) Let's call it Password Paranoia. Is it weak? Is it better? Is it strong enough? OMG, I spend way too much time on creating passwords that are strong enough. The trouble is trying to remember all of them. It's recommended to have different passwords for different venues but I just don't have enough gray matter to store them all. (And I thought that trying to solve the Sunday's NYT crossword puzzle was hard.)

Want to join my sweat? Here are some password creation guidelines from the Identity Theft Resource Center:

1) A password should contain at least eight characters (some experts say 10 or 14 characters is the minimum).
2) The password should have at least three of the four following types of characters — upper-case letters (ABC), lower-case letters (abc), numerals (123), and punctuation marks or other special characters (!#$%&*_=+? ).
3) If you’re using only one capital letter or special character, don’t make it the first or last character in the password.
4) Avoid common names, slang words or any words in the dictionary.  Computers can run through entire dictionaries in minutes.
5) Don’t include any part of your name or any part of your email addresses.
6) Choose an especially strong password for websites that hold especially sensitive personal information — for example, banks or online retailers that store your credit-card information.
7) Don’t ever refer to anything that can be learned from your social networking profiles or an Internet search. In other words, don’t make it your favorite band or movie, your pet’s name, your nickname, your phone number or, especially, your birth date.

Some people suggest picking a phrase you’ll remember.  Like taking the first letter of each word and running them together into a “word.”  Then you capitalize some letters and substitute numerals where it would make sense to.

For example “iH82M8wAliEns!”

How is that for strong?