Duh… while driving home today, I realized “why do I need to figure out tomorrow?” (To obtain “midnight”.)  Midnight is always the same number of minutes from the start of the day.  I.e. 24 hrs * 60 min/hour = 1,440 minutes in a day.

So, let’s get the minute that we’re at “now”… and then just subtract that from 1440 to get the minutes that are left in the day.   Thus take 2:

from datetime import datetime

now = datetime.now()
minutes_left = 24 * 60 - (now.hour * 60 + now.minute)

print "As of " + str(now) + \
      ", there are %d minutes until midnight" % minutes_left

Learnings & TODOs

Realized I do need to go back and learn more of the basics, to get a grasp on correct teminology.  Found this post which gave some nice pointers on things to review in the replies:

I give advise you to read thoroughly the parts

3.1. Objects , values and types http://docs.python.org/reference/datamodel.html#the-standard-type-hierarchy

and

4.1. Naming and binding http://docs.python.org/reference/executionmodel.html#naming-and-binding

References:

• http://docs.python.org/2/library/datetime.html
• http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5103329/how-to-find-out-what-methods-properties-etc-a-python-module-possesses