I'll think of a good title later

My social secretary will tell you that unless something is written down I often struggle to remember it. For numerous reasons I am finding myself having to remember more & more things in my life at the moment which has prompted me to add the awesome power of a to do list to my PHP playground & I'm finding it really useful.

Way back when I was in school the common answer to the question, "what ya' doing?" was a flat "nothing". I spent so much time as a kid being bored out of my skull, so much so that I willed myself to live by the philosophy NEVER BE DOING NOTHING. Doing anything is better than doing nothing. & so it went, I just did anything that I could find to do.

I don't know when I stopped living to this code, but I can guess that it was probably sometime around the time I started full time work & was too shattered to find something to do.

As an extension to my former philosophy I want to try to do something everyday that makes life better, regardless of how small the change may be. Today I have ticked off sorting out a bathmat for the cold foot rest under my computer desk so I don't get chilly feet, explaining to my mum how to use her new central heating, changing the direct debit for my ISP & in a few minutes I will also cross off writing about my to do list.

The first thing that went onto my to do list was, "Sort out a to do list". After that I added all the little things that I keep meaning to get around to doing. A lot of the items added were (& continue to be) bugfixes or minor enhancements to my software, a lot of tasks will cut my spending/increase my income, save me time. 3 of my outstanding tasks are typing up 3 different books for Project Guttenberg, which in turn will help with another task - learn to touch type.

All items are grouped by status: 'In progress' at the top, 'Not started' in the middle then 'Complete' at the bottom. Having the in progress stuff at the top encourages me to complete projects before taking on new ones. I also like to see the stuff I've already done to make me feel better! However, I have yet to overcome my habit of pointlessly listing tasks that I have already completed. Within each category tasks are also ranked by priority (a simple number 1-10). Finally tasks are ranked by date added so tasks added a while a go gradually bubble up to the top so I can't forget about them.

Each task can have any number of steps & you can update the number of steps completed, only when the number of completed steps equals the total number of steps does the task get marked as complete.

The first few days I was using this list I found myself blitzing through loads of tasks really quickly, but now I have settled down after adding some pretty substantial to dos. I do find it frustrating how many tasks get stuck at 'In progress' because I'm relying on other people, but I suppose that was only to be expected.

Marvelous! That's another one off the list!

Only the geeks will find this funny but...

I've recently started playing with php. I was having trouble trying to work out why my md5() hashed password script wasn't working. All the code was correct, the code to insert the data into the table matched the corresponding code to retrieve it again at login. Then I checked the table structure:

Password char(30) not null,

If I had an ounce of common sense I'd be dangerous.