A few years ago at a London Perl Workshop, one speaker's talk was titled "J. F. D. I.", he gave two very simple examples of code he wrote.
In the second example he created a simple screen-scrape module that collected live train running times, so he new if his train to work was on time. Next he used Perl to adjust his alarm clock on the fly, which was simply a Perl application controlling a PC playing MP3/Ogg files. If there was significant disruption, it then emailed his boss to say he was working from home and awoke him appropriately later.
For a beginners talk I was impressed, you can get a long way in Perl with CPAN as your friend...
