Why don't my .my.cnf settings work?
I'm not sure how your previous .my.cnf used to work, and I actually have never used these files before (mainly because I didn't know about them). So after a bit of research, I found this link and came up with the following ~/.my.cnf that worked for me:

[clientdbid]
password = mypass
database = dbname
host = server.location.com


and the command that reads it:

mysql --defaults-group-suffix=dbid


A couple things to point out (highlights from the article linked):


group has to be preceded by 'client' to be read by mysql
has to go after any [client] groups, otherwise it will be overridden


I tested this on mysql 5.5 on a Mac, worked great. And now that I know about them, I will use them!

UPDATE
After I set this up, I realized that the command line mysql --defaults-group-suffix=dbid was a little hefty. So as added bonus, assuming you're running Linux/Mac/Etc do this:

echo 'alias mysql_dbid="mysql --defaults-group-suffix=dbid"' &gt;&gt; ~/.profile


Where dbid is the name of your suffix group.