Heeee'ssss Back!

Hello to all my readers. It has been since January this year honestly since I have been creating content on my blog. For those who did not know, this has been a busy, busy year for me. Because of that, certain things have fallen off my list of things to do. Blogging was one of those things but was not the only thing.

Social Media was another thing. For most of 2019, I was only using Instagram for short stints, Twitter to help send out a few things like Patch and Switch recordings and stuff I really felt needed to get out, and I went through Facebook here and there. The only Social Media that I was keeping a real eye on was LinkedIn for professional reasons.

You might be thinking, "Why did you go away then Jared?"

Well, I got super busy and I wanted to focus on me and getting through many things going on. What might those have been? Well ...

• Got my condo ready for sale starting in February into March
• Moved out of my condo into a rental apartment (which got delayed thanks to a snowstorm and impacted my attendance for NACS 2019)
• Moved into a new rental apartment and setting it up
• Reduced the "stuff" in my home, which I need to do more of (Thanks to Wendy for helping me with this and the move preparation)
• Sold my condo (Thanks to Denise and her team of folks in getting my condo ready for sale)
• Changes in my work team that caused our on-call schedule to go to 3 weeks (1 week as a backup, 1 week as primary from 4pm to 10pm, 1 week as primary from 10am to 4pm)
• Preparations for changes to my work team in the coming months
• Shoulder pain from my prior surgery in March of 2018
• Travelling to Minnesota to help my mother visit her childhood hometowns before her brother moves to Wyoming

Quite a bit going on, eh? So what now?

Well, I am slowly getting back on Social Media. I am not going to be on it as much as I used to be. My goal is to enjoy myself and when Social Media doesn't help my enjoyment of my life, it will be packed away for a while. I will definitely be around on Instagram with more photography that I am doing. I have a backlog of photographs that I need to process and pull together. I plan to show those off more as I am proud of the shots I have been able to get so far. I am also looking forward to more shots in various places around the world.

On top of Social Media, I plan to get some blogging done. Yes ... there will be more posts here. I want to make sure I post some blog posts at least monthly, maybe even more. I have some topics I have built up for a while now and would love to get those out. If you have something for me to talk about, let me know and I can put it in my list of things to think about and blog. Easiest is to comment below or hit me up on Twitter, @jshoq.

One change to my site you might have seen is the "In The News" page. I have been using a great service to monitor RSS feeds called NewsBlur. One of the benefits of a paid account is a personal blog that I can use to call out articles and post comments about those articles. Instead of having another link off to that, I have been able to integrate it into my site. I have some more work to do on it but I am excited about it. I can offer links to articles that I have read that I feel are important along with a quick commentary of that article. Feel free to paruse that page now and look at the updates I do to it over the next few months.

In the area of talking and presenting, I have been super quiet here. Unfortunately, my summer prevented me from applying to Microsoft Ignite this year so I won't be there this November. However, thanks to David Leveille of Crush Networks and Heather Newman, I got a couple of last minute slots at SharePoint Saturday Los Angeles and Ensanda. I will post more details about each delivery but I am looking forward to seeing my SharePoint friends and talking about the Cloud, Office 365 and Power Platform.

So what is after that? Well, I hope to get out and speak again more. My team's on-call rotation is putting a bit of a hamper on that but I plan to work with my managers to get me time to head out. If you have an event where you need a speaker talking about SharePoint, Office 365, Power Platform, Azure, Cloud, DevOps or Site Reliability Engineering, please feel free to contact me about it.