Forever Odd

The following could probably easily be considered three ideas in one, but because the protocol idea seems to ‘bridge’ the other two I decided on an all-inclusive post.
I would like to write my own application-layer protocol that would allow me transfer the data, whether it be text (for chat) or something else relevant to my application(s). 
The following idea [...]

I read somewhere once that for ideas you should look to what monotonous tasks you can automate, which is how this idea started to formulate.  A co-worker, Bill, and I are putting in multiple trixbox based phone systems and are coming across allot of tweaks as we go that need to be pushed across multiple servers.   By [...]

Now that I have had a two week holiday, between finals ending and work beginning, I also decided that I would like to start my first (of many?) project for the summer.  Sometimes, I think that I should have started this project while I was off for those two weeks and had a lot more spare time [...]