I do a fair amount of speaking in my job as an Evangelist at Microsoft, but this was a very different talk. After a lot of thought (over months) on what to talk about, I came to the decision that I should relay one of the better pieces of advice that I have received. This advice was actually a tool for making big decisions in life.

Sanjay Parthasarathy, one of the great mentors in my life, taught me a tool called “The Five F’s”. In your life when you need to make a difficult decision, things will get emotional and affect your judgment. Often when working through a difficult decision some people will advise you to make a  pros and cons list. The problem with that though is it impossible with a pro and con list to not introduce emotional bias. It is also difficult with that type of list to understand how the decision will the affect key pillars of your life. “The Five F’s” help prevent that.

So after the wedding ceremony I gave my toast. I thanked all the friends and family who had travelled from far and wide to attend the wedding and also took a moment to pause and remember the family we had lost over the years, I then began to talk to Brynn and Isaac about “The Five F’s”

When making a very difficult decision in my life I sketch out a table, listing Faith, Family, Friends, Finances and Fun (the Five F’s ) alongside those columns to the right for each of the choices I have. 

Here’s an example:

With the table sketched out, I walk through each row in the table and ask myself which choice “A” or “B”, etc. favors the “F” for that row.

1. Faith – Is this decision good by God and my belief systems? Do I believe strongly in what the outcome will be?
2. Family – How will this decision affect my family? Will it hurt them? Will it benefit them? Will they support me in the decision?
3. Friends -  What will this do to my friends? Will I have more friends? Will I have Less Friends. Will it hurt the friends that I have?
4. Finances – How does this choice affect my finances? Does it improve them? Make them worse?
5. Fun – This is a super important one. I think we do forget so much in life that it is ok to have fun. Will the decision bring more joy in my life? Will it allow me to have fun?

After walking through the list and seeing where the choices land, I can then have a better idea of the impact of the decision and can analyze it a bit further. 

Some examples:

• Imagine you need to help a family member out financially.  Well in that case the decision will affect your finances negatively, but you are ok with that decision as it will help your family and it aligns with your faith.
• Maybe when you list the outcomes out you’ll find that it will be a positive in your faith, great for your family, brings you more fun, but could hurt some friends and even your finances. Even with that you might decide to go ahead with the decision.

The “Five F’s” help you go into making a final decision aware of how it affect the pillars of your life.

So the wedding was wonderful, the talk was probably one of the best I’ve given in years of having a career in public speaking. The wedding day will be a memory I will cherish forever. 

Here’s to wishing you a great year ahead of faith, family, friends finance and fun!

I just finished a migration to Wordpress from Graffiti CMS. It took awhile, but I was able to sucessfully import all of my posts and finally configure Wordpress so that my all of my permalinks are preserved.

In case you were wondering, on the server side this site is running Windows.

Lets see if I can update this more often now.

I miss blogging.

I know a number of people have written over the last few months that with the rise of social networks like Twitter and Facebook, that people are blogging less. This isn’t about that.

This about the lack of story telling or opinion in many of today’s personal tech / geek blogs.

The other night I was through a series of blogs posts that gave me an insiders view into what is happening to the housing market in Detroit through the Detroit UnReal Estate and Sweet Juniper blogs. I was able to get a glimpse from the insiders that write into what is happening in Detroit as the American auto industry resets. Sad times. It reminded me of the view I was able to get from the personal blogs of many folks in the tech business in my early days of blogging. In those days my favorite bloggers were the story tellers. These were the folks who through their blogs granted me access to experiences and insights that I did not previously have access too.

In my blogging past I think back to my posts about my youngest daughters hip problems, why I drive a Corvette, being stuck in India, a fun family trip as guests of Farm Aid or Bill Gates announcing his Transition to the Foundation as examples of where I told a story and shared an experience. Truth told, posts like these are my my most popular and my best writing. Somewhere along the way (myself included when I actually do blog), I’ve noticed many of the geek bloggers have become less about telling a story and adding insight into just rehashing the days tech news. In many cases authors just attempting to gain an audience as they rehash and repeat announcements from the popular news blogs like TechCrunch and TechFlash. Their hope? Ride the TechMeme wave and often leaving out any further analysis, insight or perspective. Not a lot of value for the reader.

Not everyone has fallen into this trap Scoble once in awhile still blogs, Jeff Attwood is the gold standard of geek bloggers and I still enjoy reading Dare’s original posts.

So, I wonder if we’ll get the stories back into personal geek blogs? I’m going to start back hee shortly and once again get back into sharing stories and lessons learned from my life.

I’m hopeful you all will too.

We use jQuery more and more throughout our sites and love it. With this app, we’re hoping to get more folks adding useful animations to their sites without having to mess with Javascript.

If you’re interesting learning more, check out the Glimmer project page where you can download the app and dig deeper on jQuery.  Over there we’ve got a set of articles written by Karsten Januszewski, Tim Aidlin, Dave Ward and Yehuda Katz

Enjoy.

Times have changed as I now use the service mostly through search, TweetDeck and by selectively sending my Tweets to Facebook.

I made a poor choice some time ago by following too many people. I used a service automatically following people that followed me. It was like a bad drug soon I was following about a thousand people. Many spammers, ridiculous and not usable.

For the last few days, I’ve spent about 15 minutes daily in the chore of un-following accounts and whittling down the number of people that I follow. I am now down to about 300 and should be complete with this penance soon. My goal when this is done is to increase the quality of the folks I follow and begin only following friends/co-workers, interesting customers (those that are already today and those that I aspire to change) along with a limited number of industry insiders/Press.

I will continue to use Tweetdeck to better organize these people into logical groupings and to keep track of the every growing number of queries I have for our products.

Hopefully it will result in more interesting and higher quality content.

Feature Request: I wish that Twitter had a way to automatically decline a follow to anyone who labels themselves as a Social Media Consultant or Real Estate Expert. These people are the modern day spam and some would say a cancer of twitter.

Photo Credit: Mukulr

My preference is to listen to open line type programs like Dr. Bill Wattenburg on KGO AM, Bruce Williams and even the occasional Coast to Coast AM.  What makes open line programs great is that the callers make up the program as opposed to guests. You’ll never know where the conversation can head.

So it was a bit of a departure last Sunday night when Bill Wattenburg had Richard Muller as a guest. Richard is the professor of one of the most popular Berkley classes (voted by students) and book of the same name Physics for Future Presidents.

So what is this all about? Physics for Future Presidents

Imagine it: You are the President and a terrorist has planted a dirty bomb in midtown Manhattan. What do you do? How do you react?  If you don’t know anything about Physics you won’t be able to act quickly or wisely. But if you do. . .

Future presidents (and voters) can’t afford to be ignorant about nuclear weapons. Physics for Future Presidents gives you the knowledge necessary to survive in today’s political and increasingly nuclear world.

What is the difference between a Uranium bomb, a Plutonium bomb, and a Hydrogen bomb? What are the real dangers of nuclear waste?

I really enjoyed this. You can watch the entire lecture series on YouTube or if you want the Cliff Notes in a great Q&A format, listen to hour 1 and hour 2 from KGO in their archives.

Plenty of fun stuff happening this week on the site, all starting with a birthday song bh Chris Anderson and Don Box. It has been a pretty amazing ride for everyone since we launched the site. A fun week ahead of celebrating, remembering and visions for the future.

Check out some of the special birthday wishes for Channel 9.

Jamie has also created a new edition of C9 Park, some birthday wallpapers and a new edition of the C9 Choir.

Thank you all for your wonderful support and for participating. Fun day, now onto building the next 5 years.  

Making up for it all was this amazing photo that my wife captured this morning. Great show of a hummingbird braving the winter for a drink in our backyard.

Great photo, but spring, please come soon.

After trying a few different pieces of Webcam software (with epic failures) I am now having success using Fwink. Fwink has now been running for about 3 weeks with no restarts required.

Hat tip to Jeremy Cath for the recommendation of Fwink.

I’m actually on a secret mission (guess its not a secret now) to eat at all of the places that Guy Fieri frequents on his popular Food Network show. While in Las Vegas for Mix on our last night I convinced a four friends to make a trip off the beaten path to the Four Kegs.

If you are a Guy Fieri fan boy like me, well this place is like a Graceland. It is where guy hung out while going to college. While there we ordered strombolis, ribs, the cheese steak sandwich, a salad and a few drinks each.

Total bill $86.00. Not bad for food and drinks for five. The food  was as good as it looked in the video above and we really enjoyed the staff.

Lots of character, I’ll definitely be going back. Now, for the next dive on my list.