It seems to be the done thing these days to learn how to use Google App Engine (and thus Python) within a couple of hours and then hack out a simple web application to prove how easy it is.
So with the missus out of town tonight, I'm staying out of trouble by doing just that. I've run through the getting started tutorial, which is a delight I have to say, especially because it's so darned simple to get going on Mac OS X. Python is already installed and there's a neat app to download from Google which installs the app engine SDK bits and puts a nice GUI front end on it for you to fire up the local test environment and various other handy things, as well as installing the command line tools if you prefer them. Start up TextMate or any other editor of your choice and you're away!
You'll have to take my word for it though, because I'm tired and won't get onto writing my own app tonight.
Footnote: Python seems OK, but so far I prefer Ruby, though they seem to share a lot in common.
