I've been on a little Conway's Game of Life kick for the past couple weeks myself. Such a simple algorithm like this is great for learning a new programming language.

I recently started learning python, so I wrote an implementation using the pygame library. If you're interested, you can see it here: http://readysquid.com/blog/programming/conways-game-of-life/

Feel free to take the source and play with it if you'd like.