Keeping up to date and fresh with web design/dev

[Irl_Designer]

Due to pure lack of opportunity at home I've recently abandoned ship and left Ireland. Currently in Spain, teaching English and doing the odd bit of bar work. A brief departure from anything web-based ... but I haven't given up on it completely.

Onto my question:

Aside from a few mins a night reading good quality blogs and sites like Smashing Mag, Design Reviver, Build Internet, Boagworld etc (to name just a few that come to mind) ... and following the odd tutorial for pshop, illustrator etc - what's the best way to keep fresh with web design?

I've considered looking around for a nixer or two here, as the market seems pretty much un-tapped for any English speaking bars/restaurants, if time permits.

Have a few other options:

A trial account with lynda.com, or similar, to learn some new tricks.
Build my portfolio with some photography or illustration.
Finally get around to learning Flash (have been procrastinating for 2+ years now)

Any other ideas?

 

[Firefly Web]

Maybe a good thing to do would be do download, if you havn't already, Xampp (for windows) or Mampp (for Mac) and start messing around with content management systems like Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress etc.. I think it would probably be more useful than learning how to use Flash for the moment, even though Flash is a good skill to have, I'd leave that till after so that it could complement the other skills rather than being the main one. That Lynda training isn't too bad, maybe some HTML and CSS stuff could be a good idea if you need to do more work on it.