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Mike Zornek

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Series: Journals

88 posts, newest first.

June 2024 Review

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about June 2024 (and some early July things too).

May 2024 Review

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about May 2024.

April 2024 Review

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about April 2024.

March 2024 Review

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about March 2024.

February 2024 Review

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about February 2024.

January 2024 Review

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about January 2024.

December 2023 Review

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about December 2023.

November 2023 Review

A collection of accomplishments, notes, and observations about November 2023.

Journal -- June 12, 2023

Time for the regular check-in to braindump what I've been up to and what I'm thinking about. Who reads this stuff?

Boston 2022 Trip

After hosting a Christmas Eve party and visiting my Aunt's house for Christmas Day, my sister and I went to Boston for a few days.

2022 Phillies Recap and Thank You!

I look back on the 2022 season with immense pride for my team and offer particular thanks for giving me so much enjoyment during a time of personal need.

Journal -- September 18, 2022

A short recap of the last two weeks since ElixirConf. A review of project progress and what's on tap for next week.

Baseball Hall of Fame Trip Recap

I just returned from my trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY, and I thought I'd share some notes and photos.

Extended Vacation (Again)

Repeating my choice from last year, I have decided to take an extended vacation from consulting this summer to catch up on some learning plans and otherwise invest in personal projects.

Quantum JIRA

Random crossover that occurred to me during a morning walk.

Mom's Passing

Over the last few months, I have had to increasingly step back from friends and work to help take care of my mother. She passed away on Friday, February 4th.

Casual Updates (Video 7m)

A short video where I catch you all up on my various project: Guildflow, Android Book Club, consulting work search, ideas in my head.

Personal Lockdown Update

Again, I'm thankful for my privilege. I have savings to live off for a while. But let's not forget, there are people out there starving and this program right now is bringing no relief.

Things Change Fast

It was only March 1st when I last did a rather normal personal update and man did things change fast for us all. I think it would be bizarre to look back at my blog and not find any writings about the Coronavirus, so …

Spinning Plates

I don’t do a ton of writing here but I do like to post updates at least once a month. Sadly I missed February. 😢 Truth be told, things are just really busy right now. First, I did land a new contracting gig which …

A Smorgasbord of Updates, July 2019

That feeling when you realize you have not posted and the month is almost over. 😳 Overall July has been pretty lax and it was kind of planned that way. The last week of June I was on a shore vacation with the family and …

Rainy Monday

Rain washes out my way to work, It’s a Riker flashback lunchtime episode, and WoW Patch Day! Happy Patch Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lmsMSQDVPM

On Using and Not Using Twitter (video 8m)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7Dwcpa21JM A quick and dirty video journal reviewing my past and future use of Twitter. My issues with the platform and my upcoming interest in marketing some new education content …

Neck Surgery Recovery Update

My neck surgery on Friday was a success. It was more complicated than expected (2.5 hours under instead of the planned 45-60 minutes). The cyst had grown much larger than anticipated and was interwoven between lots of …

Fever Dreams

While I had hopes of doing more productive things, I ended up spending the last few days in bed fighting off a pretty lousy sinus / chest cold. Between the medicines and the fever, I don’t think I had more than 90 …

Dongle Emotions

After letting my bedroom / office get out of hand, I took some time today to clean up and get organized. I wrapped and grouped up my wires and even opened up some of the new USB3/Thunderbolt3 dongles I had ordered to go …

A Few Dental Stories Amongst Subscribers

One of my guilty (and time consuming) pleasures is YouTube. I watch a lot of YouTube. Mostly video game and movie stuff, lots of WoW channels (even though I’m not playing much right now), a few Let’s Players and of …

Mid-week Checkin

It’s Wednesday night and as expected it’s been both an exhausting and rewarding week so far here at the Front End Web class. Here is the table of contents we’ve been working through: Introduction Chapter 1: Setting Up …

Memorable Songs from Pivotal Indy Moments of Your Life

While attending the Release Notes Conference this past week I saw a talk by Mike Hurley of RelayFM fame. A lot of the talk was pulling wisdoms from Mike’s own story, the history of his past projects up to working on …

Summer Hiatus Update

Hello internets. So sorry for the summer hiatus here on the blog. So what have you been up to? (Email me and say hi!) I’ve been doing good. WWDC was a fun time in June and shortly after that I had 6 days down the shore …

Phone Names

I love coming up with fun names for my computer hardware. My computers typically are named after video game characters, for example my Mac mini CI server is called GLaDOS. She loves to test. My phones have similar names. …

July Recap

I’d hate to go a month without posting so here’s some random updates! Philly CocoaHeads is going as strong as ever. Our WWDC June meeting filled the Apple Store Briefing Room to capacity (~50 people!) with lots of …

Checking In: April Flu, New Desk, Taxes

Sorry for the lack of updates. I kind of fell into a work drought over last few weeks with a mixture of a bad stomach bug, a new desk which required lots of teardown of my office and now a few days of tax paperwork. Oh …

November 12, 1955

Unbelievable that Old Biff could’ve chosen that particular date. It could mean that that point in time inherently contains some sort of cosmic significance, almost as if it were the temporal junction point of the entire …

Catching Up: How Have You Been?

Publishing to this blog is something I enjoy, but sadly not something I’m naturally good at doing on a regular basis. Forgive me Internets, it has been three months since my last confession, err blog post. So what’s been …

A New Beginning

I miss blogging. For a while it was a major way I interacted with the community, shared my thoughts, and met new people. I vaguely remember shutting down this site down in favor of putting my full attention behind …