My littel brother Ben and I took a hike yesterday to clear our heads. We're both flinging ourselves into the Internet's latest technologies, and our heads are spinning. Not a bad place to spin, and a great place to have a poi retreat. :)

I spent the rest of the day trying to learn Drupal, the Content Management System that's going to help me roll out the new playpoi.com.

I also keep getting sucked into zaadz, which is an exciting social networking initiative, among other things.

...and I'm doing some poi practice, but I'm pretty distracted. I have this tendency to get very engaged with things. If I can apply myself to communications technologies the way I did to poi... well, I hope to have the same result.

This is actually part of what I've found so hard about the last five years. I had to make a lot of sacrifices to practice poi the way I did. The menial jobs I end up working don't help me with the skills development that I think is so vital to living up to my potential. While it was great getting good at poi, I've had to let my communications visionary hat hang on the wall most of the time, and now I have a lot of catching up to do.
...but I can do it!

Having Ben here is great. I got pretty depressed last year, what with losing everything in my failed running-a-poi-studio attempt. He's really helping me get back on my happy feet, and I'm realizing the studio didn't work because it just wasn't the right thing (ok, not having the skills, resources, or money to launch a studio was another factor). I'm better off having the freedom to travel, and to live cheap when I need to fling myself into a project.

Oh, and Ben launched his own blog last night.