I guess most people people do it that way (I used to: my Yahoo password was “9timyp” (random digit, and “this is my Yahoo password”) but I think that practice is obsolete. Too many passwords to remember (and you don’t want to reuse them!) and some passwords need to change regularly.

The only practical approach is to never make up passwords yourself. Instead, use a software tool like Roboform, which stores your passwords in an (optionally encrypted) database and generates new passwords upon request. When you generate a password, you can choose the different character sets used and the length of the password. This determines the bit strength of the password.

Many passwords generated this way do poorly with Password Meter. Why? Even though they’re totally random, they often violate the rules that Password Meter lays down, such as repeated letters and not having symbols. (Even if you specify symbols, there’s a random chance that Roboform won’t generate them for a given password.) These rules might apply to human generated passwords (though I’m not sure how using a letter more than once is supposed to make a password more guessable), but are totally inapplicable to software generated passwords.