I have a random set of 8 letters (was actually an original Blueyonder-now Virgin-email password. 2 of the letters can be changed to password safe characters ( a=@, e=€, l=£, s=$, c=¢ etc) and I have 2 numbers at the end. The password starts with a capital, has special characters and the number at the end increments by 1 each time it's required.
It is not advisable to have the same password for every application and that was reinforced with Twitter password being visible as plain text to some last week,,,, I'll take my chances though!