Recent content on Justin Vollmer
I visited family this past week, and while there ran/participated in a Mario Kart tournament with some family friends. And because I’m a bit extra, I also built a full 8-bit-themed bracket website to support it (and future game sessions)! 🙃
After over a year of weekly notes, I’ve decided to place the series on indefinite hiatus. I’ve struggled to keep up with it over the past 2-3 months, as my time has been consumed by projects I’m not ready to write about (work and personal). I’m going to try to focus more on dedicated posts as it makes sense in the near future. No guaranteed schedule, just finding my voice…
Back to the office this week, with some storm spotter training on the weekend, and a bit of gaming!
Holy Week, 2026! 🌥️
Back to a busier week, combined with preparations for Easter!
This was an overall pretty standard week for me…
Daylight Savings Time has arrived! 🌄
For the first time in a while, I got to spend at least one day this week heads-down on a project!
Another busy week, with a fun team dinner on Thursday to break it up! 🙂
Another short entry this week; keeping busy at work, and unfortunately not spending a ton of time on personal projects.
Short entry this week; I’ve been busy with work/personal projects and I don’t have much to share…
At long last, my schedule started slowing down this week! 🎉
This week actually ended up busier than the last, though unlike last week it was primarily during office hours. 🤔
This week’s update might be even shorter than last… with Winter Conference going on, my week was heavily consumed by work discussions and dinners. But I’ll make up for it with more photos than normal. 😉
Shorter post this week… a lot has been going on, but mostly work-related, and therefore not much to share here…
One full week of 2026 over already? 😐
All the cool kids, or at least Robb , Matt , and Jan-Lukas are updating their app defaults, something that started in the blogosphere back in 2023. And I can’t resist jumping on a fun bandwagon when I see one, and so… here’s mine! (honestly not much has changed since 2023 and 2024 )
First weekly note of the new year! 🎉 I’m trying out a new format for my weekly notes this year; we’ll see how long it lasts. Instead of a giant run-on list mixing personal and professional, I’m splitting the two, and throwing in a “notable” section, which is for events, and may sometimes be omitted. Additionally, I think I’m going to try keeping track of my…
Happy New Year! 🎉 At dusk this evening the moon was bright in the eastern sky, and I decided to have fun taking photos of it. Here’s one of the better shots, taken with some old Minolta glass on my GH5. 📸
I did a little review, and unless I’ve missed a post somewhere, I’ve only once written a public “New Year’s Resolutions”. I considered titling this post my “2026 Resolutions”, but that doesn’t exactly capture what I’m going for. Rather, these are intended to be goals and aspirations that I can measure myself against at the end of the year, and…
“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” - Gandalf, The Lord of the Rings That remains one of my favorite quotes. I’ve used it before, and decided instead of as the ending quote, it would be my opener. Anyhow… on to my year in review! Another year in the books! As has become my yearly routine, I’m taking time to reflect on the major…
I’ve seen a number of other bloggers writing year-end book reviews and commentary on what they read (shoutout specifically to Manu , SuperBetsy , and Jeremy Keith ), and I decided to join the fun!
Week in Review It’s the last full week of the year! (Yes, I know, next week is 50/50… I will probably start my week numbering over for 2026 next week though.) Sunday afternoon, after posting my weekly update, I headed home to visit family for the holidays. Sunday evening I gave my sister one of her gifts: a cold brew coffee maker, which we promptly had to try. Spoiler alert: she loved…
Following my pattern from yesterday, for Christmas this year, I thought I’d take the opportunity to post the lyrics of one of my favorite Christmas hymns: From Heaven Above to Earth I Come (LSB 358) 1 “From heav’n above to earth I come to bear good news to ev’ry home: Glad tidings of great joy I bring, Whereof I now will say and sing: 2 “To you this night is born a…
Merry Christmas to all! The pictured ornament is a gift commemorating a project I contributed to at work, the 20|20, given out a few years ago. 📸
For Christmas Eve this year, I thought I’d take the opportunity to post the lyrics of one of my favorite Advent hymns: What Hope! An Eden Prophesied (LSB 342) 1 What hope! An Eden prophesied Where tame live with the wild; The lamb and lion side by side, Led by a little child! 2 A shoot will sprout from Jesse’s stem, A branch from David’s line, A Prince of Peace in Bethlehem: The fruit of…
Week in Review It’s the last week before Christmas! I was in-office every day this week, though my schedule became more focused on wrapping up small projects, cleaning, and preparing for the new year than usual.
Week in Review Monday and Tuesday were pretty normal, with meetings scattered throughout the day. As I did last week, I worked remote Monday morning, then drove to the office for some in-person work in the afternoon. Tuesday evening was our R&D Christmas party at a local establishment. For the… fourth year in a row, I was on the planning committee, so I arrived slightly early to set up, and…
This past week largely saw a return to my normal schedule. I worked remotely Monday morning, then headed to the office for some in-person meetings later in the day. Monday evening as I prepared to leave work, a coworker asked me about my photo backup strategy, something I’d mentioned in passing before, but never in detail. She asked me to send her my recommendations, and instead of just a…
Yesterday afternoon in the office, one of my coworkers asked me (paraphrasing) how I back up my photos so that everything isn’t only in iCloud, and what I would recommend that she do. And, because I’m a geek (and a bit extra at times), instead of just sending her my recommendations, I decided to turn this into a full blog post that I can point others to in the future. 😁
This week I’m combining two posts into one (25.46 and 25.47), as I was a) delayed writing last week’s post, and b) it was looking short anyhow. I mentioned last week that I was heading to a game night after my post, which I did! This time, instead of just games, we also did a puzzle (in only… 3-4 hours?).
Happy Thanksgiving! 🦃
Over lunch, some colleagues and I were discussing why Christmas music is its own genre, with specific sounds. For fun, I asked an LLM to generate a plausible but fictitious explanation, and a few seconds later, this amusing anecdote was born… The Scientific Classification of Christmas Music The Temporal Frequency Hypothesis Christmas music constitutes its own genre due to a rare phenomenon…
Welcome to weekly note number 45 for 2025! Not much out of the ordinary occurred in the office this week. I was in all 5 days, including a longer-than-normal Friday, due to me shifting some meetings that needed to occur but that I couldn’t find a place for to Friday. Tuesday evening, a coworker that is primarily remote was in town, so a group of us went out to dinner in the evening at the…
This week’s post will be fairly short. I was in the office Monday - Thursday, with a slightly higher volume of meetings than normal. Wednesday morning I met a coworker at a local restaurant for breakfast and to catch up, which was a nice way to start the day!
Apparently, moving projects between groups in GitLab can have unintended side effects on pipelines and deployments. Which makes sense, but wish I’d have thought of that ahead of time … 😬
Welcome to my 43rd weekly note post! I referenced in last week’s post that I was heading to play games with a colleague & her daughter (M) while they were in the area. Obligatory photo below. 🙂
This week’s update might be even shorter than last week’s, although with a few twists! I worked from the office all week, with a majority of my meetings taking place on Monday (other than standard cadence meetings throughout the week). This week was a little quieter than normal, as a number of close colleagues were traveling for meetings…
I think I’ll keep this week’s update short and sweet. 🙂 A majority of this week in-office was spent in user acceptance testing of the new systems. My time wasn’t needed quite as heavily as last week though, so I started to get back to a normal work schedule.
After being gone all of last week, it was nice to be home and in a little bit more of a normal routine this week! However… as luck would have it, I had actually moved my Fargo trip from last week forward, as this week’s schedule needed my attention in-office for training on some new systems.
This week was one of my busier in a while, as I was in-office on Monday morning, then traveled Monday afternoon/evening to Fargo, ND for some meetings with colleagues based out of our office there. Tuesday morning through Friday mid-afternoon was spent in meetings, some planned, some impromptu, and enjoying interacting in-person with team members that I normally only see virtually. I don’t…
This week will once again be a shorter post, as a majority of the week followed my normal patterns work/life patterns. I was in-office all week, splitting time between meetings and continued deployment work on the aforementioned ECAD tool. Wednesday, a group from work visited Jonah’s Oyster Bar for dinner, where I enjoyed my standard spread of Salmon, New England Clam Chowder, and a…
This week’s post is a bit shorter than the last few (which in general isn’t bad in my opinion). I was in-office every day this week, and split my time between meetings & email (as usual), and continued work on deployment of the ECAD tool I referenced last week, which consumed a majority of my time. On Monday, the RuneScape Catalyst League went live, and I spent some time (normally an…
This week turned out to include a nice mix of work projects, local events, and some quality time experimenting with new tools. The weather has been all over the place though… enjoyably cool early in the week, then warming back up to obnoxious for September by Thursday. Monday was a pretty standard day in the office. After work (and dinner), I decided to experiment with having Claude help me…
I decided to enjoy some of the last of the cooler weather for a while, and go for an evening walk… And was pleasantly surprised by a mostly-cloudless sky, and a bright full moon to keep me company tonight! 🌕
This week turned out to be an interesting mix of holiday productivity, server upgrades, good food, and diving deeper into some AI tools (a phrase I never thought I’d write). Since Monday was Labor Day here in the US, I had the day off, and spent it doing some small personal projects around the house, plus working on another work-related project that I’ve not had time for in the office…
The downside of getting my vehicle’s oil changed at a dealership is that I’m really tempted to start looking at new vehicles… A small test drive couldn’t hurt, could it? 🤔
It’s been another week already? Well, I guess that means it’s time for another blog post! Monday was fairly routine – nothing particularly noteworthy to report. Just the typical start-of-week meetings and catching up on projects. However, Tuesday brought a fun change of pace as I headed down to the Farm Progress Show in Decatur with some coworkers. For those not familiar, it’s…
This week was mostly back to my normal routine, with a few bright spots that made it memorable. Monday started off on a high note when one of my coworkers brought in homemade blueberry pie to celebrate a team member’s birthday. There’s something about unexpected office treats that just makes the whole day better – and this pie was no exception!
After a week away, this week it was back to the office, and a semi-normal schedule. Well… okay, half-normal. I had a coworker from Fargo visiting this week, which meant a few extra meetings, and a few extra meals out! Monday was pretty standard, preparing for the week ahead and catching up on a few things I’d missed while out. Tuesday we had multiple vendors meeting in for meetings,…