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I found a great to-do list/task manager application yesterday, called—appropriately enough—tasks. It’s a PHP-driven web application, rather than a standard application. This has the advantage (or disadvantage, depending on your stress levels) of making your to-do list available from any computer. You can even get it to email you a list of upcoming and overdue tasks every day with a well-placed cron job.

It’s very smooth indeed, and being written in PHP you can customise it to your needs and tastes. This makes me want to learn PHP, but I think I’d better wait until I’ve got at least a tenuous grip on Perl before I tackle that. Alex King also has a very smart looking gallery application to sort out your image collection from a similar PHP interface. The whole thing makes me want to get my own server so that I could have my calendars, tasks, music and photos available from any other computer. I don’t suppose that anyone has got a G4 going spare that they would care to donate to me? No, I thought not.

For the first time this year, cycling back home yesterday, I smelt the summer smell. That indefinable scent of grass and nectar and warm air that means that summer has arrived at last. Of course, since this is Britain, this means that we have perhaps two or three days of summer weather to enjoy before the drizzle sets in again.

For the past few days, I’ve been hanging out with two friends from the States: Joe and Morgen. It was great to meet them—we had only corresponded by email and phone before, but they were every bit as charming, funny and interesting as I expected. I was trying to do my tour guide bit, but managed to be inaccurate to the tune of a few centuries either way on the dates of old buildings and colleges. History was never my strong point… I was surprised by how much I learned about Oxford. I’ve been here 12 years now, but there’s apparently still a lot that I don’t know about what I think of as my home town. I suppose it’s always the same: you don’t really appreciate your surroundings until you see them through someone else’s eyes.

I’m sorry if you had problems loading this site yesterday. The whole of my host’s domain was out for hours. It turns out that they had a small fire in their server room, and had to evacuate the place and then get everything back up again. There doesn’t seem to have been any harm done anyway. I think everything is still here, but if you emailed me yesterday, it may have got lost in the system.