I have started my Perl adventure somewhere in 1995/1996 (can't remember). I have read some very first aricles in newspapers in Poland and thought, that Perl is a language designed for me :-)
At first all of the people around were suprised... "What the hell are you doing?!" they asked - it was like a kind of magic. In one week all of my 9 servers started to report their work to my very first mobile phone. People told me that i am mad or something :-) but i had a great time. During time i was writing IRC bots with more and more sophiscated functions (one of the bots had even very simple NN/genetic algorithm to lear new badwords and kick/ban users according to the automatically calculated weight of a word). Some of the users wanted to kill me for that, but thanks to regular expressions, nobody could get a way around my badword function :-) During these years i did a lot of strange/crazy/funny/scary (pick as many as you want) things with perl and it was (and still is) great!
Now i am writing code for fun, sometimes to do something more useful :-) Even now, all of my scripts are still working on all of my 16 servers :-) still reporting, looking (the servers) after each other and providing distributed security for all of 16 machines in diferent parts of Poland.

Perl is the language, that gave me an opportunity to express myself in very creative and useful way.
Thanks Larry! Thankyou my fellow-monks. Without you, my life would be very very sad.

Greetz, Tom.