doing things just for the heck of it

Just wondering if I am the only idiot to who does things for no other reason then that I have never done it before (I call it my own personal R&D).

If I'm not - what have you been doing "just cause"?

couple of my current R&D:
1) creating a basic CMS from semi-scratch just cause I never have before (using Smarty as my templating system) - pages, classes, and DB design posted on blog
2) Installing (done) and connecting to an oracle DB just cause PHP has recently created a partnership with it (and cause my old pl/sql skills are getting VERY rusty) - this one is really biting me in the buttocks right now.
3) Reading up on Perl (think I want to try to turn my hand to it little later in the year)
4) Reading up a little bit on Ruby - to see what the big deal is about.
5) semi-trying to learn how to use Linux - have it installed on a machine - just can't find the time to sit down with a book and play with it.

Previous R&D that I have later used in projects- couple of PEAR classes, Smarty, OOP (don't live by it - but use it when it calls for it), Vim (prefered editor now), shell scripts, and cron.

No, your not the only one. I've written calendar, BB, and CMS programs just for learning reason. I usually do them to see if I can figure out the problem.

My problem is, I'll get to the point where I've figured out how to do it, and fleshed out the code a bit, but I will never go back and polish the program. This leaves me with a lot of half finished code lying around my hard drive.

Same thing happens to me. I've started a full featured BB like phpBB and never really got into it. Also, other things like whole websites I never finished, etc.

You're looking at a 'for the heck of it' web site .

Well Matt, you give me hope that I'll finish something someday!

/me doesn't feel so alone now

Man, I have like over 300 megs of unfinished scripts and stuff, from message boards, to templating systems, to websites... ya...

Thats how my AIM bot came about, boredom

/sign

EXCEPT i archives the bugger and hamerat them till their perfect, then i fault the scrips here for the nubies by giving out whole sources to use.