Crypto stuff

I had a little extra time to catch up on life this weekend and found myself slowly getting sucked into stuff on Bruce's site that I've missed over time.  Ever since I picked up Applied Cryptography (and my Borland C++ compiler), I've appreciated how much butt he kicks.  I've used Password Safe for a while and toy with the idea of porting it to the compact framework, but each time I get overwhelmed with the feeling that most of the stuff I work on is lame and unimportant.  Even on 'cooler' projects involving WCF and WF, at the end of the day, it' still sort of the same stuff different day.

How do you read something like this and not feel jealous that there's a lot cooler stuff out there than writing line of business apps?

"I had a client once who desperately wanted to design his own encryption algorithm. He had no cryptographic training, no experience analyzing other algorithms. He was a designer, he said, not an analyst. So Counterpane did his analysis for him, and we broke his algorithm in a day. He fixed it and sent it back, and we broke it in two days. He fixed it and sent it back again, and we broke it again. Finally, the fourth version of his algorithm resisted our attempts at cryptanalysis...at least for the full 40 hours our contract specified. The client was happy; finally, he had a secure algorithm."