I had WAY more fun at work than I expected. After my internship last summer, I was kind of "down" on being a DBA. But now that I have my own projects, its actually interesting. I work for some really cool groups: Noise Engineering Labs, Propulsion Labs, Airport Technology, and the application they use to have a customer configure their airplane. And, after they buy an airplane, they can get access to MyBoeingFleet[1]... which I will also be working on.
I think I'm also having fun because I'm learning a lot about databases. And lately, I've been interested in large amounts of data, information retrieval, and informatics. And I'm just starting work on writing a web crawler (something I've always wanted to do just for fun). After taking a class in Evolutionary Algorithms (EA), I became really interested in that, and in the last couple of weeks... I've started thinking about ways to apply EAs to a search engine. If I do anything cool, I'm sure I'll post the results here. For right now, I want to write the web crawler, because I like data (the stuff, not the character). As the old adage says: the more, merrier.

[1] Secure, password protected site for online maintenance, engineering, and flight operations data for airline customers. Also, list of service centers, spare parts search, and tracking of Website metrics.