On the_title() and php’s strtolower()

Hi all,

I’ve been trying to get my posts’ titles to get converted to lower cases but have had no luck so far. This is what I’m working with:

<?php $s = the_title();
$s = strtolower($s); ?>
<h2>
<a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>"><?php echo $s; ?></a></h2>

Am I missing something here (php/wordpress -related)?