There are some ideas you might want to check out in this thread: What was your first program?

In your post you seem to keep switching between your natural desire to work on projects of merit and your desire to learn the basics. You can do both at the same time, but basically you just have to program something every day. It's kind of like working out at the gym everyday, but for your mind.

Most people seem to have started by programming a tank game *grin*. Many seemed to have hacked up current games or programs, or attempted math challenges. I remember when I started I wanted to write the most excellent program that everyone would use. I still wouldn't mind doing that *grin*. But I developed my skills writing a whole bunch of little programs - usually reimplementing something someone else did. Scrolling text marquees, text editors, text adventure games and then onto little graphical games.

As to getting involved... no program's going to be useful unless it fulfils a need. If you wanted to help the open source movement and get experience you could start by reimplementing some simple commercial utilities. If you wrote a utility to convert MSWORD files to Latex or SGML I'd download it and use it heavily. That would certainly develope your perl skills too.

If you don't want to start anything yourself then you can (yes I know you don't want to, but what are your other options) check sourceforge for a stalled perl project. One such is Internet Imperialists which would possibly be very popular if someone added a few more features. At least, every time someone mentions SRE on ./ every one posts "I'd love to play a game like that".

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Jeremy
I didn't believe in evil until I dated it.