(Photo by a colleague.)

Attended a workshop about facilitating workshops, with activities about activities. Quite meta.

One of the activities was to practise visual collaboration, so we wrote and drew our ideal working days.

In our small group, we all agreed that a good foundation for an ideal day is predictability. Knowing roughly what to expect from the day, in general.

All four of us then wanted to work mostly on our own most of the day. I had expected more people to want to pair program or do collaborative work, thinking it was just my preference to be left alone to get work done.

We did all want some social interaction, though. Opinions diverged on how.

For me an ideal day would involve helping others somehow – either delivering something that users find useful, or helping someone in my team with something. I was alone on this one.

The others in the team instead preferred to socialize after work, with some alcohol, which I have no interest in at all. In fact after-work events are more of a chore for me than actual work.

Away travelling overnight on business. Got to the hotel late in the evening, after a four-and-a-half-hour train ride. Googled for nearby restaurants but was too tired to even choose one, so I went to the Burger King right next door. I can’t remember when I last ate there, but how bad can it be, right? People go there every day.

It really was quite bad. The fried cheese was good, but the burger was truly not an experience I want to repeat. The blandest possible white bread; pale, hard tomato; tasteless iceberg lettuce; sauce with barely any flavour. Was it always this flavourless, or has it gone downhill in recent years? Don’t know, don’t care, just have to remember to stay away. A piece of bread and a tub of yogurt from the nearest convenience store would have tasted better.

Did my talk about multi-tenancy again, for the fifth time or something. Lots of people signed up and almost all turned up to listen. So many of them came by to thank me afterwards that it was almost embarrassing, but I’m working on accepting praise with grace. But I really need to find a new topic soon.

The snowdrops are buried under snow.

Actually, waffle day was yesterday, but we’re having waffles today instead.

Apparently winter wasn’t done yet. We got fresh snow again – enough to require shovelling the stairs. Sigh.

Most of the maths I did in school was maths for maths’ sake. Brain training, preparing for higher studies, etc. I’ve had very little use for it in everyday life. So when I do need it, it’s kind of gratifying. Today I used the properties of similar triangles to figure out sizing for my shawl. If I have 9 full pattern repeats after using 70% of the yarn, how many pattern repeats can I get if I use all of it? There is a red insert after every pattern repeat, and the last insert is a special one. Will the special one be the 9th, 10th, or 11th?

This winter has been off and on since November. Stockholm gets a large amount of snow, and a couple of weeks later, it’s all gone again. And then it repeats again and again. It didn’t feel like a proper winter, but it also didn’t give up. I am done with it, and I hope that this was the last of it. Now the most recent snowfall has melted, although there are still piles in corners where it’s been dumped, and snowdrops and Eranthis are flowering.

I’m helping out Spånga scout club, with their everyday accounting and payments and such. I haven’t done any actual accounting since 1999. Mostly it’s like riding a bike – it came back to me quite fast. But I do have to use my 25-year-old mnemonic to remember whether I need to debit or credit an account.