What I'm working on right now is a project to decode a certain technical book publisher's output of their books. They provide free views of all the chapters of their books with words below a certain length having their letters consistently (but randomly per word) replaced with other letters. Words over a certain length have their letters not replaced but shuffled. Things like punctuation are left unchanged.
This is an interesting problem that requires good data structures, good input data (n-gram statistics), can be improved with skills in lexing and parsing. It's just a really neat problem.
I don't mind buying the books, but present an interesting challenge and I'm hooked.
My job is actually pretty nice. I genuinely like my coworkers and I work remotely. I just get bored and frustrated with the way web dev goes.
Don't want to say more than that.