I inherited a 'creaky' legacy system - and the server needed to be rebooted. It hadn't been rebooted in 5+ years.

I did all of the sensible things: I checked that the backups were up to date - and then I manually copied the entire codebase and local data and database to another server before touching anything, just to be sure.

Reboot ... dead.

Restore everything ... still dead.

After a lot of tracking down I discovered that a previous developer had placed critical config in /tmp /tmp was purged on reboot.

I then discovered that the backup system was configured to ignore /tmp - because ... /tmp

That took a lot of effort and guesswork to rebuild.

Now I always copy /tmp before rebooting anything with a long uptime ;)

How about this one:
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2012/01/why-one-game-developer-is-skipping-e3-to-start-an-anti-sopa-crusade.ars

A games company boycotting E3, and using the $50k they would have spent going to set up a group protesting SOPA instead.

The main issue with that type of method is that you don't know if the site you're connecting to stores the password in plain text or not - and there are a lot more out there than you might think.
If it does, then you've just potentially revealed *every* password, for every account you own, on every site - because the pattern is so easy to spot and understand.
As soon as that site gets cracked (which, if they're stupid enough to store plain text passwords, is going to be highly likely) - you're in deep trouble.
Or maybe the owners of the site aren't averse to taking a peek into the password list and checking out the email account you signed up with ...
Patterns are great for remembering - but you'd still need to have several, so that you can use different methods of generating passwords for different sets of sites. That way you can keep accounts partitioned and reduce the damage when one of your patterns gets outed.

Actually, that's not 100% true. In the UK it's legal to produce up to 2500 litres of biodiesel tax free, for personal use. If you produce more than 2500 litres per annum you have to register for a licence and pay duty. http://www.lowcvp.org.uk/news/682/bulletin/

Res ipsa loquitur - only really used in negligence cases, but "it's obvious" can actually be a legal argument.