Combined with a structured form in which to describe the problem (and my favorite is the Kepner-Tregoe red card), I have found this to be an excellent exercise, both in terms of helping me solve the problem, but also in terms of the ability of others to solve a problem which I can’t solve – whether it is due to a lack of knowledge or a lack of access.

It comes, however, at a cost. It takes time and effort. Whether or not it is worth that cost is something one must evaluate at a case by case basis. The way I see it, there is little to no reason to do so if the issue is one which has been seen a number of times before. That information should already be documented, in accordance with the second principle of the Hacker attitude.

On the other hand, a novel issue – or an otherwise well-known issue forwarded to someone who is, as yet, unfamiliar with it – has something to gain from being thoroughly described. In the first case, the reason should be obvious; a novel issue must be well-described in order for a solution to be reached. In the latter case, it is a question of being both a good colleague, and sharing one’s knowledge so that others may learn.

• Start PowerShell with administrative privileges
• Run this command: Get-WindowsCapability -Name RSAT* -Online | Select-Object -Property DisplayName, State

The first full year (as in period of 365 days, rather than a calendar year) of more or less normalcy have come and gone with very little in the way of fanfare since covid-measures were lifted in Norway. Life, for most of us, goes on.

My duties as head of my union local have continued unabated. I won an uncontested re-election this spring, and have negotiated a wage increase for my now more than two hundred members. That, however, took some wrangling, three rounds of negotiations – the last of which was between the central parties, with me as a spectator.

I noted, in my roundup last year, that I was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation. I am happy to report that I have since undergone node ablation, and that I have seen significant improvement as a result.

Readership of the blog continues to fluctuate, sometimes as high as 1600 monthly readers, and sometimes as low as half that. That, however, is entirely incidental. I continue to blog for a readership of one, and everyone else is a welcome bonus. I have been blogging for more than fifteen years, and am coming up on nine hundred blog posts in those years.

As always, finding both the time and the inspiration to blog can be a bit of a challenge, but I have been able to keep it up. That, in and of itself, feels like an achievement to me. I keep learning, and I keep documenting what I learn – for myself to reference, as well as to share with others. Like I did in ’21 and ’22, I have decided to take a summer hiatus. Expect more posts from me in the middle or so of August.

1. Start PowerShell with administrative privileges
2. Run this command: Add-WindowsCapability -Online -Name Rsat.ActiveDirectory.DS-LDS.Tools~~~~0.0.1.0

1. Select the cell in question
2. Click the Name Box in the upper left hand side just above the spreadsheet
3. Enter the desired name
4. Hit return

To use it, simply enter the name you selected instead of the cell name. In my example below, I’ve given cell C2 the name USDNOK. The beauty of this, is that it works across all spreadsheets in a workbook. If the cell you want to address is in sheet 1, and you want to use it in sheet 2, you address it in exactly the same way.

I have come to realize that not everyone knows or understands what Pride is all about. It’s honestly quite simple. It is about basic human rights. The right to define oneself, ones gender identity, and ones sexual preference. The right to love who one loves, and to be oneself, without the fear of ostracism, harassment, or punishment. It is, in other words, about this:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

United States Declaration of Independence

And yet, it happens to be that the LGBTQIA+ community are the targets of exactly these things, not to mention erasure and any number of claims that are offensive, bordering on libel. This is an untenable state of affairs.

I think it might also be worth it to remind ourselves that while Pride is a celebration, it is also very much a protest. The protest is an integral part of Pride. Pride started with the Stonewall riots, which are an integral part of Pride even today.

All of this is to say that the choice being between being an ally, doing nothing, or opposing them is to me no choice at all. I stand with my fellow human beings on the LGBTQIA+ spectrum.

For as long as I can remember, I have had the Hacker attitude as part of my about-box on LinkedIn. Originally minted by Eric S. Raymond, the Hacker attitude is described in terms of five principles:

1. The world is full of fascinating problems waiting to be solved
2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice
3. Boredom and drudgery are evil
4. Freedom is good
5. Attitude is no substitute for competence

These five have been part of my guiding principles in what I do. In particular, the second one is a big part of why I write this blog. Some of what I write is reproduced elsewhere by others, and some isn’t. That, however, is very much beside the point – namely that ensuring that the information is available to anyone who might want it is a good thing.

As an IT support and operations professional, it is sadly true that we all too often are unable to truly solve an issue – or for that matter prevent an issue to reoccur. Having a known – and documented – solution helps ameliorate this fact.

* By “better” or “best”, I mean in terms of accuracy of the results provided.

Academic pursuits are just one example are. As a native Norwegian speaker, I have also found Google to be less than ideal the more obscure the knowledge I am looking for is. Here are some other sites that I have found to be helpful as Google becomes increasingly less so:

• refseek
  • Refseek is what Google Scholar tries – and in my experience fails – to be; a good search engine to find academic information.
• Springer Link
  • Springer Link, too, is a great resource for searching scientific articles, journals, books etc.
• WorldCat
  • WorldCat lets you search the collections of thousands of libraries around the world, in order to find a copy of that book that you absolutely need to get your hands on.
• Bioline
  • Bioline is a more specialized search engine, allowing you access to research journals published in developing countries in the field of bioscience.
• Research Papers in Economics
  • Another more specialized search engine, RePEc lets you search in research in economics and related areas.
• Science.gov
  • An inter-agency initiative from thirteen US Government agencies, Science.gov offers access to R&D results and more from these agencies.
• PDF Drive
  • A huge repository of more than eighty million eBooks and PDF files, all free for download.
• Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
  • BASE is another academic search engine, indexing metadata from journals, institutional repositories etc.

There are many, many more out there, but I and others have found all of these ones to be useful.

• if_not_found
  • Here you specify what to do if a valid match is not found
  • Defaults to #N/A
• match_mode
  • Specify the match type
  • 0: exact match – default setting which returns the error specified in if_not_found
  • -1: exact match OR the next smaller item
  • 1: exact match OR the next larger item

There are a few other variations, whose use has been documented by Microsoft.

My lookup table lists average pay in age groups, listed by starting age for the age group. The table is in a worksheet called “Average Pay“. The age group is in column A, the average pay in column C. The age of the person is question is in my calculations sheet, in column Z. My finished function for row 72 looks something like this:

=XLOOKUP(Z72,'Average Pay'!A:A,'Average Pay'!C:C,ERROR,-1). Translated to human terms, we’re looking for the value in cell Z72 in column A of the Average Pay Worksheet. We’re returning the value in column C for an exact match OR the next lower match. If no match is returned, we return “ERROR” instead.

In order to do this, I use the XLOOKUP function in its simplest form. Here’s the original table:

The basic syntax of the function is =XLOOKUP(lookup_value, lookup_array, return_array). In the example above, the lookup value is in cell A2. The lookup array is in column C, and the return array is in column D. That gives us the following formatted function: =XLOOKUP(A2,C:C,D:D).

I recently reworked my home office so that I could use my Mac with my large external monitor, and that introduced a new wrinkle; I no longer opened the screen, and had thus lost my default method of locking it (i.e. by closing the screen again). Here are some other methods you can use to lock your Mac:

Arguably the simplest option – other than closing the monitor – is using the keyboard shortcut Command+Control+Q. If you find yourself not remembering that, you can always go to the Apple menue, and click Lock Screen:

Another option is to set up a hot corner to lock the screen. Open System Settings, go to Desktop & Dock, scroll down to Hot Corners (at the bottom), and select Lock Screen for one of the corners:

The syntax is =DATEDIF(startdate,enddate,UNIT). The units are D for days, M for complete months, and Y for complete years, and here’s how it looks in use:

In addition to those three unit variants, you can also calculate the months or days between the dates, ignoring the years and dates or months as the case might be, using the units “YM” to count months, and “YD” to count days. Here’s how that looks:

Last week, in innumerable jewish homes around the whole world, families sat down for the Pesach Seder – the ritual, festive, meal of Passover. The Seder is explicitly meant to be an arena where we teach our children about our history. The relevant quote from the torah (Exodus 13:8) goes as follows:

The celebration of the holiday is centered around children, and our children have important roles to play. Sometimes as questioners (as they read Ma Nisthana (lit. “what differentiates”) where they ask why this night is different from others, sometimes as recipients of knowledge and tradition, and sometimes as archetypes.

The seder plate, together with the matzah, forms the centerpiece of the seder table, and comprises six elements that are laden with symbolism. This year, ours looked like this:

• The zeroah – bone – represents the paschal offering in the temple
• The beitzah – egg – represents the pre-holiday offering in the temple
• The maror and chatzeret – bitter herbs – (on my plate the grated horseradish (mixed with some beetroot juice) and radish) reminds us of the bitterness of slavery in Egypt
• The charoset – paste – represents the mortar and brick made by the jews as they toiled in the slavery of the Pharaohs
• The karpas – vegetable – alludes to the backbreaking work of slavery

Traditions matter. They are bearers of identity and community, and I am truly happy to be able to pass this one on to my children.

Luckily, this – and any other attribute – can be easily looked up using the PowerShell get-aduser command. Format the command like this: get-aduser "USERNAME" -properties extensionAttribute6.

If you want to look up multiple specific attributes, simply divide them with a comma, like so: get-aduser "USERNAME" -properties extensionAttribute6, extensionAttribute6.

This method does assume that end users have read access to Active Directory, but I’ve yet to encounter a domain where that isn’t the case.

Here’s how you build your function:

• =AVERAGEIF
• Range to calculate average
• First criterion range
• First criterion for evaluation
• Second criterion range
• Second criterion for evaluation
• …

My example here uses column B as the range for average calculation, column A as the first criterion range, a unique value as the first criterion to evaluate, column C as the second criterion range, and ALPHA as the first criterion to evaluate. The actual function looks like this =AVERAGEIFS(B:B,A:A,D2,C:C,"ALPHA"), and the result looks as follows:

The function is not case sensitive. In other words, if I were to replace ALPHA with AlPhA, alpha, or any other combination of upper and/or lower case, it would still return the same result.

If there are no results, however, Excel returns #DIV/0. Luckily, you can use the IFERROR-function to ensure that the function fails gracefully. In that case, the function would look something like this: =IFERROR(AVERAGEIFS(B:B,A:A,D2,C:C,"ALPHA"),"N/A").

This time, I’m going to use that list of unique codes to find average amounts for each code. To do this, I used the AVERAGEIF-function. The format is as follows:

• =AVERAGEIF
• Range to lookup
• Criterion for evaluation
• Range to calculate average

In the example below, my range to lookup is in column A, the criterion for evaluation (in this case the individual unique value found in the overall list) is in column C, and the range from which the average is to be calculated is in column B. For the criterion for evaluation, I specify a single cell. This gives me a formula that looks like this: =AVERAGEIF(A:A,C2,B:B).

I copy and paste this to the individual cells for all forty seven entries, giving me a list that looks like this:

For this example, assume that you want all unique entries in column A. In this case, simply use the following function in the top cell of a different column: =UNIQUE(A:A). In the below example I’ve evaluated eight hundred individual entries and the function returns the forty seven unique ones.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be showing you some practical examples of how I use these kinds of lookup tables.

In order to do this, I needed to add a second X-axis to my data. I start out by creating a scatter chart in much the same way as I did last week, though this time I chose a scatter chart with straight lines and markers:

Next, I right-clicked the graph I wanted to map on the secondary axis, and clicked Format Data Series:

In the Format Data Series sidebar, I opted to plot the series on the Secondary axis:

To finish it all off, I added labels, titles and legends in order to make it all more readily legible:

One of the tools I use to do this is scatter plot diagrams with trendlines. I want the diagram to show annual wage on the Y-axis, age on the X-axis. In order to identify gender differences, I also want to have the individual plots colored differently for men and women.

I start out by copying the raw data I get from management to a new sheet. I convert birth years to approximate age by subtracting birth year from the current year using =SUM(YEAR-BIRTHYEAR). I then sort by gender, which gives me a table that looks something like this:

I delete the header row, then select the columns for Age and Annual pay for the women, go to Insert > Scatter Chart. Then I click Select Data in the Chart Design tab. I open Series1 and rename it “Women”, then add a second series. I name it “Men” and select the relevant Age and Annual pay cells in the field for X and Y value, respectively:

This gives me this scatter chart:

Useful, though not as useful as it might be. Let’s start out by clipping the axes. I select and right-click the Y-axis, and select “Format Axis”. I set the bounds to 20 and 75, respectively, and set the major unit to 5:

For the X axis, I change the minimum bounds to 350’000, while leaving the remaining settings automatically set. I add – and set – chart and axis titles, and a legend. This gives us this chart:

Employees often see their pay increases taper as they grow older, and the above chart appears to support this. In order to readily identify those employees whose pay is below the mean, I also add trend lines. In the Chart Design tab, I click Add Chart Element, and add linear trend lines for both men and women, giving us our final chart:

The first red flag here is the generic and bland text. I’m sure this works on some people, but I’ve seen similar crap before. The next red flag is that their profile name has nothing at all in common with the name that they sign with. I’ve seen that before, and it’s always a sign that I’m talking to another one of these hucksters.

I asked my standard questions (in-office or telecommuting, name of the client, pay scale, and a general job description. The only thing I got in return was very broad wishlist of skills which essentially amounts to tier one support representative. I already know I’m not going to apply, but let’s get a little more information before we turn it down, why don’t we? I once again asked them to give me the information I asked for.

This time around, I get the name of the client; a company well-known for their poor working conditions and exploitative use of consultancy contracts. I press further, and am finally rewarded with this:

Now, as this is being written, the industry standard base pay is around 560’000 per year. They are approaching me, with my nineteen years of relevant experience, asking me to take a downward move at a serious pay cut? Yeah, that’s just not happening.