You have to want something. Hackers want to solve problems. They'll invent problems just to have a problem to solve. So you are going to have to do that too. Invent a problem you want to solve.
What kinds of things do you do with computers? What do you wish was easier? What do you think is fun? Build an iPhone app. Build a website to help you track your time or productivity. Build something you will use and love for a long time.
what kind of business do you run? Do you have employees? What questions do you spend a lot of time answering because information is all over the place?
The most fun and laid back way is to do it when no one expect anything from you and you are doing it to make your life better.
I feel bad saying this, but also try learning Visual Basic for Applications with Excel.
This is actually a great suggestion for anyone who works with Excel a lot. Knowing VBA (VB for Apps) can save you (or your assistant) hours of repetitive work. Here's a good way to learn:
1. Notice some annoying task that you do regularly in Excel (e.g., importing a data file, preforming a calculation on a data set, or laying out data in a visually pleasing way).
2. Find the Record Macro command, then do the task again.
3. Excel automatically creates source code for the macro. You can open up VBA from some Excel menu; that will show you the code.
4. Edit the code to do what you really want. Often the generated code isn't perfect, or there are other features that you'd like.
I will warn you though - VBA is kind of a horrible, poorly documented language. It's not unusable, though - you just don't want to use it for large projects.
With that said, The Little Schemer is a good one to start on.
It's no more frustrating than losing at poker or some type of competitive game or politics.
If you want to start on the hip bleeding edge, there is also a project to make processing usable with scala, search for SPDE.
And there is processing.js if you want to include you animations in a web site.
For that reason, you might consider playing around with JavaScript, where the effects of your changes are just a "refresh" away. Get hold of jQuery and play with the tutorials, maybe. (Install Firebug so you can see what's going on in your code)
Javascript can actually be a real app since you can store information in an SQL database on the client (in the latest browsers). My first iPhone app was actually a JavaScript page that stores data in SQLite, and uses a CSS template to look just like a native app (it's a Hacker's Diet implementation).
But fnid is right: fundamentally, you need a problem to solve. It's most fun if you implement something that is directly useful to you.
Greasemonkey lets you make changes to websites by writing small programs and it is fairly easy to find problems around the web to fix.
Example problem to solve: Hide posts on Hacker News from blogs that you already read elsewhere or that you don't like.
Flash (and actionscript, which is akin to Javascript) would allow you to do that with graphics... but if you don't want to mess with that, just make a text-based game. Something simple like two player tic-tac-toe with an AI, just displaying a new board after every move, would get you a long way. Python and Ruby are good languages for things like this... as is Scheme or Javascript.
and this looks promising (and the author posts here on HN) and should fit your "laidback" requirement: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1593272006/ref...
Anyone have any recommendations for getting more familiar with programming in a fun, laid back way? Nothing specific I want to do with it, just think it'd be a neat thing to spend some hours in. All recommendations appreciated greatly.