Out of mind numbing boredom I made a system for SEO spam websites during this time. I would take expiring domain names (so names someone had gone to the trouble to research but been unable to make work) parse out keywords and lookup popularity for them, lookup ad rates for them, and spit out names to buy and make a SEO spam site for (goal was 300 websites making $1 a day or $100k a year), or good names to domain squat. If a domain turned out bunk I threw my link-spam-network software on it to provide linkbacks to my money/new sites. I made around 30k profit a year plus another $5k selling domain names doing this before life fell further apart and it rotted on the vine. I was really tempted to sell it as a package but could never bring myself that low even deep in addiction. Plus Google started cracking down on that trash.
I still think the concept of 300 somethings (though please not SEO spam) that make a dollar a day is viable for us here though because we're in the unique position where the creation/maintenance is just a matter of our spare time since we can do the specs/design/coding/administration/maintenance/etc ourselves. It seems like there are still people doing this. Look at new car model forums. Everytime a new car models is released there's a rush to create discussion forums for that model with people hoping Google blesses theirs so they can add it to their portfolio of money maker car model forums. Maybe the secret sauce is forcing yourself to watch reality TV until your mind rebels and says 'fine, grab me the laptop and we'll make mind numbingly boring software products as that is at least better than watching this'.
Edit: To clarify this wasn't my income source this was just what I did while being forced to watch 'The Kardashians' for bonding time.