About Me

My name is Michael, I’m a 30-something living in Carrickfergus, just outside Belfast in Northern Ireland. I’m originally from Newtownabbey, which is a bit closer to Belfast than Carrickfergus is. I’m a Physics graduate from Queen’s University in Belfast.

I currently work in Henderson Wholesale in Mallusk as IS Operations Manager, heading up the desktop support, infrastructure and telecoms functions.  We supply all SPAR, EUROSPAR, Vivo, Vivo Extra and Vivo Essentials retailers in Northern Ireland, along with providing foodservice to a wide variety of hotels, cafes, restaurants, etc across the island of Ireland. I’ve around 15 years experience within IT, and have spent almost 10 of those years within enterprise IT across a number of different roles, from software developer, to DevOps and Infrastructure, to the operations manager role I’m in today.

I’m a relatively keen amateur photographer, when I have some time I love to take my camera out for a walk to the nearest pretty location, and sometimes I get a few decent shots.

I hold an amateur radio (ham radio) licence, my call sign is MI0GJN – the namesake for this website. After being fairly inactive on the radio for the best part of a decade, I’ve been on more since June/July 2018. Most work is currently VHF/UHF FM from the car, or while ‘pedestrian mobile’ – I do like a good rag-chew, so if you do hear me around the repeaters/Echolink nodes in NI or a bit further afield, please give me a shout.

I would consider myself a proponent of freedom of speech, freedom of knowledge – basically freedom of pretty much everything.  I understand that not everybody holds these views, and of course they’re free to believe whatever they want. I try to support these freedoms in any way I can, and one way I do help is by running a tor middle relay. This is something that anyone with some spare bandwidth, a spare computer (even a Raspberry Pi) and a bit of time can donate, and it contributes greatly to the tor network (https://torproject.org).

Content on this website, and any of my social media channels is my own opinion, not that of my employer, or any associates.

Some interesting folks to read about

  • Richard Stallman
    • Founder of GNU Project and Free Software Foundation
  • Linus Torvalds
    • Creator of the Linux kernel
  • Richard Feynman
    • Physicist