I love the Holiday season.  I think I especially love the emotional aspect of the December holidays.  I have two young children and this was really the first year that my oldest (3.5) really “got” the whole Santa and gift giving dynamic.  It was the best Christmas morning I’ve ever had in my life.  I’m a little sad that I have to wait another 365 days until the next one.

I think its a pretty human thing to do: always look forward to the “next thing”.  To me, this feels a little bit like wishing your life away—sometimes it’s hard to slow down and really embrace the experience of Right Now.  That’s the other reason that I really enjoy the Holiday season: it’s always a time of sensible Reflection and anticipatory New Beginnings.

That was the segue into a couple/few announcements:

#1: In a couple of days I will be joining SharePoint 911 as SharePoint consultant.  It was a difficult decision to move on from my current employer here in the Greater Cincinnati Area, Ascendum Solutions.  Ascendum is an awesome organization to work for—I enjoyed the hell out of  my time there.  The experience and education I walked away with there is indispensable.  At the same time, Shane (who runs SharePoint911 with his wife) and I have been friends for a long time (even before he was a SharePoint rock star), and the team he’s put together at SharePoint911 is second to none.  I can’t wait to contribute to this organization.  This leads me to…

#2: I should be held accountable if this space isn’t much more active in the very near future.  One of the things that so attracted to work with SharePoint911 was the organization’s commitment to the technical (specifically SharePoint) community.  So I expect to much more active here, as well as the other common haunts of the SharePoint community.  I have also been taking an active leadership role at the Cincinnati SharePoint User Group (web site in transition and URL forthcoming) as the Membership Coordinator.  The technical community is truly something I’m passionate about, and have been for a long time, and the opportunity to become even more active in that respect is one in which I hope to take full advantage.

#3: Ironically, this blog will probably contain a little more than just SharePoint.  If you know me or have seen me speak/write in other venues, you know that I have a little bit of a propensity for development activities.  For me, this is mostly a learning exercise.  See, I don’t particularly like to develop, it just happens that I learn the most when I’m digging into the details of the SharePoint APIs.  I often wonder how many people realize that about 95% of SharePoint runs on the same object model and API code that is exposed to the SharePoint Developers and Admin (yes, I wrote Admin—Powershell, remember?).  Expect to see a lot of "SharePoint + 1" here.  Silverlight, JQuery, etc.

Also, since I hate having multiple of just about anything, I won’t be housing a separate “personal” web site--I will be paring down the categories on this blog (going from umpteen to, um, three I think).  That way if you want to ignore my personal mumbo jumbo, like how awesome my kids are :) you can just follow the technical categories.  I use twitter primarily for reach into the technical community, so you will find my technical post/articles blasted there.

I think that’s it for now, here’s a summary:

• Holidays = Awesome
• Me = On SharePoint911 Team (New & Awesome)
• This blog = More active (& Awesome, hopefully)
• This blog = some rehashing.
• Follow me on twitter.
• Be Sure to Drink your Ovaltine.  Just kidding.  Watched A Christmas Story like 5 times today.

Edit: wife read this and pointed out some data ommisions (like a reference to her, which is solved with this edit comment) and some grammar mistakes.  Fixed, I think.