As I keep forgetting important dates over and over again I came up with a crude perl script. Maybe you will find this useful. The birthday file syntax looks like:
$ cat .birthdays # This is a birthday files # lines beginning with a pound sign '#' are ignored # The format for this file is as follows # birthday date |Year of birth| Name | warn this early in days # # Example # 1. October|1932|Grandma|5 # Means: Warn me 5 days before Grandma's birthday on 1st of October.