How about trying to think of an itch to scratch? There has bound to be some task you always wished to have a tool or module for; something that you sorely miss during your daily work routine, or which would just be handy to have. I can always think of four or five of these, and while they're usually not very complicated to implement, doing so properly with a solid generic interface (whether commandline or API) typically takes a bit of effort. Using downtime to write one of these sounds like a good investment.

Maybe, if that's your inclination, you can even donate it to the world as free opensource software; if you choose to do so however, be sure to check your contract with your employer. It may restrict the rights you have on software written at work or even in your spare time (flashbacks from the tilly incident.. sigh).

Makeshifts last the longest.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.