Over the last week PHP’s strtotime impressed me over and over again since I probably abused it. It is a universal converter of English string representation of date/time/timestamp (whatever time related) to UNIX timestamp. And I am not talking just about converting string like 1.9.1989 or 1/9/1989 but also something like 1 week ago, +1 day, last day of previous month or even more awesome, 1.9.1989 + 5 days, fourth Thursday of Nov 2003.