Two weeks ago marked a very auspicious anniversary for me--I filmed and published my 400th tech blog! When I published my very first tech blog on September 8, 2008, I could scarcely have imagined that six years and some change later that it would have grown into the institution that it has. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that despite offering a host of other content and trying to experiment with the form that my tech blog was and still is the cornerstone of my offerings to the poi world.

This year 11 people made the top 10 favorites video due to a tie. I've been asked to put together a comprehensive breakdown of how the votes came out this year as well as comparing them to the votes from last year. So first and foremost, let's see who made the list this year:

I got to know you because Greyhound fucked up.

Continuing my series exploring pieces of my poi math paper step-by-step. I've previously gone over the basics of the math and how to use it to model simple flowers and third order motions.

Four months ago, Jon Alvarez asked a seemingly innocuous question on the Poi Chat forum on Facebook that led me to one of the most mammoth undertakings of my adult life: has anybody set down definitions of all the poi moves in one place? The answer is sadly no, but it got me thinking about why that answer was no...beyond whether someone had set up a dictionary or encyclopedia, to the very heart of how we define poi tricks and discuss them online.

The 2014 Fire Festival Season will begin in 2 months! Here is a calendar of every Fire Festival that's declared dates in 2014 along with a link to the website for each festival. Please check back on occasion as I'll be posting more festivals as their dates become available.

A couple days ago, I posted a message on Facebook asking for suggestions on who I could do a future "Profiles in Poi" video on and Rob "Bluecat" Thorburn replied with a very intriguing breakdown. Rob cited a number of spinners whom he classified as old, middle, and new school poi spinners. I dug the idea, but thought a division into four instead of three groups made more sense.

Last week I flew down to Florida for a couple days and had the opportunity to test out a theory I've held for a long time about travel with fire tools. Years ago when I was flying home from Burning Man, a pair of my fire staves was confiscated from me as I boarded my flight at the Reno airport to come home. I'd checked in late and as such, my bag was being manually taken to the plane rather than going through the usual steps and by the time it arrived at the aircraft, they'd taken the staves off of it.