Confused semi-newbie programmer needs some advice.
plinkplonk: This is probably different from the other (great) advice on this page, but here goes.If you have 10 months before you got back to university, I suggest, you work with one language and build something substantial in that time. It doesn't matter which language you select (and this is where my advice differs from those of  people  who recommend lisp/Haskell and so on, you could choose C or C++ or Java, it doesn't matter).The key is to make something substantial, but which also has a lot of intermediate stopping points (a ray tracer/renderer is a good example, it gives you visual feedback of your progress) and work on it every day. Writing a large program is substantially different experience from working through toy examples and you will learn a lot, irrespective of the language you use.Of course you could still use lisp or haskell or smalltalk (EDIT: if you are already somewhat familiar with them, learning a new language and building something large is tricky) if you so choose, but it doesn't matter really.Just build something ambitious.My 2 cents. 
Good Luck.