Christian Leonard Quale @clq@clq.im

Since everyone else is doing it, an #introduction toot from me too(t):

Hi! I'm clq! I live in Oslo, and work as a Software Engineer. I'm in my (just about) early 30s. I have a variety of interests, few of which I ever post about online due to a “who could possible care?”-feeling, but hey, maybe that can change.

I'll be posting mainly in English. Even though I've lived in Oslo for almost 8 years now, I've worked, and had most of my social life, in English since moving back to Norway.

Here we go.

After struggling to decide which instance to use for a while, I decided to go for what I see as being most in the spirit of the Fediverse, and host my own personal instance. Somehow it feels like the most right, and future-proof, way to follow people from across many different instances.

It also conforms with the "everyone hosting their own data whenever possible" idea I am rather fond of.

I'm happy to say that, after a few months living with the ailment, I have cured my PivotTable problem.

I wrote a PowerShell script that gathers the data I need, processes it in the way I want (pivots it, one could say), generates the GnuPlot script needed to create the chart I want, and finally generates the chart I need with GnuPlot.

I feel like a developer again.

As a bonus, it's also easier to use a colour-pallet suitable for people with a limited ability to distinguish between colours.

I'm kind of entertained by getting a UK recruitment mail literally minutes after Johnson's speech yesterday.

Come to your senses on free movement and trade, get back some basic values, and we might talk.

So glad I learnt to read sheet music.

Once again, my Mastodon went down because the disk was full. However, this time it was so full that even the media remove script wouldn't run - I had to delete caches manually.

...I really should write a periodic delete script, but I keep meaning to migrate this thing to a container...

Anyway, this has been the first part of non-work procrastination in a day without meetings which will hopefully take a productive upturn starting in about 23 seconds.

On a related note, I have a feeling that managers who say "people are more productive when working from an office" are implicitly admitting to not knowing how to use the tool that is meetings properly. If a team meets online now and then to bounce ideas off each other, the way that would happen organically at an office, I don't see why being at the same location would matter.

I do think meetings in general have an undeservedly bad reputation. Or, rather, well set-up/organised meetings do. If the people hosting and attending the meetings put in the right amount of effort before and during the meeting, a day of meetings can be incredibly productive. It always bugs me a little when people speak about meetings like they're time-wasters by definition.

Like scrum - in the 5% of cases where it's used well, it can be useful. People don't use it properly, so it has a bad rep

A... a day without meetings! Which, at the start of it, always makes me feel that my potential for productivity is infinite!

Now, let's see if this will end up being one of those days where I look back at it going "That went well!" or "Meh, I wish I had had some meetings today, at least I would have felt like I did something..."

I'm getting too old to build computers on the floor. My back demands a workbench for next time.

Sub-annoyance at the seeming impossibility of buying cables for a PSU separately from the PSU itself (I'm missing a PSU for a new computer-build, and my backup plan for stealing the PSU from my daily driver temporarily becomes all the more complicated by also having to steal all the cables...)

I'm not sure what I'm the most annoyed at: ETAs for deliveries from online stores where the "E" does a lot of heavy lifting, or at myself for never learning this lesson.

A month later: I'm trying to use a Pivot Table in exactly the same way, but I've completely forgotten how I did it. Part of me is proud of the fact that I'm not entirely on the dark side, yet, but part of me also misses and desires the dark goodness which is a properly pivoted table.

Oslo having a good train-day...

The water from my tap (central Oslo) has become much more "bubbly" the past couple of days. If I fill a bottle now, I have to take a break, wait for bubbles to disperse, and then continue filling. Anyone else, or is this hyper-local?