Journal: Programming Communitys?

I'm currently in the military and am going to get out in about a year, so I'm trying to dust off my programming skills and get some new ones, but I have trouble learning stuff solo (I need a challenge when I am, and also project ideas). So I was wondering if anyone knows of any Programming Communities one could go to get advices and light tutorship from. I use Source Forge quite a bit for playing around, but I don't want to jump into a project and end up just wasting space or causing more work for the rest of the team. Back in high school I found some communities on yahoo chat rooms, but since then yahoo has gone down the toilet as far as chat rooms go. And I have also tried Google searches and came up with nothing. Since I am in the military I don't have a lot of time for school, which also disqualifies me for Google's Summer of Code. After I'm out of the military I will be going to college for programming and will work towards my Ph.D. where I want to focus on A.I. development. But I may stop after my masters to work for Google, since their perks are so awesome.