Advice needed for wannabe bioinformatician

[helloworld123]

Hi all

I'm a recent maths graduate currently working in database marketing in the corporate sector (I should apologise), but I'm more interested in bioinformatics / general research as my eventual career. As I enjoy scripting and problem solving, and have a natural interest in scientific research (as opposed to just profit making!) I think I'd be suited to it as well.

I'm looking for a masters in the UK for October entry, but in the meantime I'd be interested in gaining some skills which could be relevant. Could anyone recommend any programming languages / academic areas of research that would be good to look at before then? As a guide I could probably manage a single OU course and / or learning about a software package or two. If I could pass it off as relevant to my job that'd make things even easier...

The sort of stuff I could definitely do at work would be:

Excel Visual basic
SQLs
HTML
maybe Python
MS batch files

and I currently have:

rusty but generally good knowledge of a wide variety of maths & stats
Good Office applications knowledge (incl Access) and knowledge of a statistical package
Not much knowledge of biology

Thanks in advance,
P