I got the brilliant, or perhaps not so brilliant idea of taking my collection of CDs and turning it into a gallery of album covers. This was not easy and being forced to use PHP as that is what was on my webhost didn't help manners. I investigated a variety of APIs and web services and made a variety of versions until I got one I was satisfied with or I just ran out of time or hit upon a limitation I couldn't overcome.
I ended up having to hand format a 500+ line file so that I could do something with the data, in the mean time I wrote a bunch of proof of concept type code. I also did a lot of Googling about PHP. Eventually I built a mashup or two you can have fun playing with. I built these mashups during my third period of lengthy unemployment post-MBA, thanks again for not negatively affecting me guys and gals.