I would suggest not trying to think of learning this cool thing and all. That's wrong attitude imo. Java's pretty cool too, even though personally I'm Anti-Java. Continue with SICP, learn Functional Programming. Practice Cormen exercises with python or any language of your choice. Looking for a very awesome open source project, well hit this http://www.financialnetworkanalyzer.com/.
For algorithms: http://www.topcoder.com/tc
I would suggest not trying to think of learning this cool thing and all. That's wrong attitude imo. Java's pretty cool too, even though personally I'm Anti-Java. Continue with SICP, learn Functional Programming. Practice Cormen exercises with python or any language of your choice. Looking for a very awesome open source project, well hit this http://www.financialnetworkanalyzer.com/.
For inspiration: http://norvig.com/21-days.html