The best programs are written because of necessity.

I started off my perl life as a sysadmin. My first perl program was a wrapper for whois, which i wrote when multiple registrars started doing .com/.net/.org registrations. It was 10 lines long, and awful, but it saved me keystrokes. And i'm lazy.

My second program automated some named operations. It automatically checked out (via rcs) a zone file while it was being edited (so that multiple people wouldn't be able to change the same file). It also automatically incremented the serial number of the zone file (something i always forgot to do).

My third program scanned through inverse dns records, and checked them agains A records. Once again, this was something that took forever to do by hand, so laziness was my motivation.

I guess what i'm getting at is the fact that i'm sure there's something that you have to do all the time that would be nice to be automated (network tests / cisco configuration, for example). So find something that you hate doing, and automate it.</p?

Remeber, the three virtues of a good programmer are Laziness, Impatience, Hubris. Make sure that at least one of those virtues is the driving force behind your code, and you'll be set....