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You want to do user-facing stuff? Then don't bother with desktop programming, write webapps. HTML and JavaScript are much easier than C++. You don't even have to learn the server side at first, a lot of useful stuff can be written as a standalone html file with no server support. For example you could make your own draggable interface to the free map tiles from http://openstreetmap.org - basically it's all just cleverly positioned image elements named like this, within a rectangular element that responds to mouse events. Or, if a little server-side coding doesn't scare you, you could make a realtime chat webpage. Stuff like that.
If you need any help at all, my email is vladimir.slepnev at gmail and I'm often online in gtalk.
Thanks for the advice and generous offer of help!