"Reinvent the wheel"
I'm really glad to read your comments on this. I spent a lot of time figuring out how to unencode form data, parse email headers, etc, etc and then finally used the appropriate module to achieve that. But I learned a whole lot. I'd often get accused of trying to reinvent the wheel, but my thought was always that if someone had figured out how to do those things I ought to be able to do it also...well, maybe my self confidence was more than was due, but the exercises were really instructive!
Great post!
chas