You’ve got a strong back—get a job!

Here’s the current roster of personal projects I’m working on in an effort to become more employable:

• A realtime, multithreaded Scala program which I'm building in stages but which I envision will probably end up at 10-20,000 lines of code--involving realtime computations against a NoSQL database and interaction with a SOAP service.
• A build-your-own content-management website á là mywedding.com—I’m tinkering with the Django, Drupal, and Catalyst MVC frameworks, trying to decide which will work best while getting some exposure to PHP 5, Python 3, and Moose in the bargain. This will include a MySQL backend, so I’m brushing up on SQL as well.
• Some Arduino toys including a couple of retro, 8-bit-style Gameduino games to polish my rusty C skills.
• A slightly more ambitious microcontroller project, this one using an ARM board and the mbed platform to do some real-world data acquisition and control of a mechanical system (that’s deliberately vague: more details will come when I start to get an idea whether it’ll actually work!).

(A gold star for those who know what classic ’90s movie the title of this post is a quote from.)