A beginning programmer

[Eric]

Greetings everyone;

Fresh High School graduate here with a passion for problem solving. My
last 2 years of HS I took programming courses (actually fairly good
ones; yay for good tech departments) that showed me

QuickBasic
VisualBasic
C++
Java

(in that order)

A friend of mine often talked about how nice Python was and being an
xkcd fan, i saw Python come up alot in the jokes. Python's awesome; I
see limitless possibilities in a very easy to understand and use
language that as xkcd put it "Programmings fun again!"

My problem is this though... I don't know what to do with this new
found knowledge of these languages. I'm a linux user so availability
of development tools is haaaaaaardly a problem. But I just don't know
what to do with it, I don't have any problems that need to be solved
and unfortunately I'm not familar enough with the languages (except
maybe c++) to help out the big projects like KDE / Gnome.

I realize this is the python mailing list and that I brought up some
non-python languages but I'm sure my situation is hardly new for those
looking to get into programming but having no idea of where to begin.

Any feedback is much appreciated!

-Eric-