Indeed, this is how my dad encouraged me. We wrote Game of Life in Basic together. Visual stuff is very rewarding when programming - I wrote a lot of animations in Basic which was a lot of fun. In python or C there are probably good libraries that you could make a wrapper around and make it easy to draw and animate things.

w00t! It's nice to see some good publicity for openoffice. Yet another step in taking over the world with open-source software... ;-)

<offtopic>/me is really starting to enjoy having a (Gentoo) Linux powered computer that has $0 worth but 2.7GB (du -h /usr/portage/distfiles) of software. It's nice having source to everything, so I can, for example, add keyboard shortcuts to Eye of GNOME for things it odesn't have them for. It's also nice to have all the API's and utilities on my system documented in one place (/usr/doc) so I can write software without being tied to the Internet to search for information.</offtopic>