You might also want to look at processing and try to develop some fun visualizations or animations of business data you care about. That might give you the ince

You might also want to look at processing and try to develop some fun visualizations or animations of business data you care about. That might give you the incentive to actually dive into programming and processing is designed to give non-programmers quick sucesses. And if you grow out of the training wheels, it doesn't tie you down since you can easily move to full java using processing as a library. 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.