I was cleaning up some dirty database data (microsoft access). Took forever to do it by hand, so started learning regexes with the Regex Coach toy. Pretty cool, so I then started using using vb script regexes on the access data. Problem was, Regex Coach was a PCRE regex toy, and vbscript regexes aren't PCRE, eg, no lookahead/lookbehind, etc etc.

Dotnet was coming out then, and dotnot had PCRE regexes, so I spent a month or so reading MSDN, trying to figure out how to write a dotnet component that could be accessed through VBA... ugh... trying to mentally justify spending the money to buy visual studio... ugh ugh ugh... generally being depressed.

Then I had a minor PCRE regex question, asked it on perlmonks, got an answer, I think within seconds. The right answer. :)

Still here...