My teacher's suggestion was to do something that YOU wanted to do - that was of interest to you. This caused me to write a program that culled headlines off newspapers in Scotland. Completely useless to most people I know but it REALLY gave me a good education in regular expressions and parsing web pages by hand ( and yes I know that there are modules to do that, but that wasn't the point ).

Originally I was looking at about 25 newspapers, mostly small town ones, but it was at least fun. Now I'm currently in a rewrite encompassing about 92 papers.

The other thing I did was to write an image map program in Perl/Tk. That was interesting, but a pain for a while -- just ask my wife.

My point is, find something somebody's either done that you like, or do something YOU like in Perl. Something for yourself, not for the office.

I honestly think what you may be experiencing is a mild post code depression ( well that may be a bit strong, but I don't know how else you'd put it ). There's a certain euphoria that you get when you finish a project, but after a few days that glow tends to wear off and you're looking for the next "fix".

Go and do something fun. That's my 2 cents.

Some people fall from grace. I prefer a running start...