[Techtalk] Mistakes as a learning tool (was: Sound card gone missing - OSS/ALSA woes)

[TraceyC]

On 03/17/2012 02:16 PM, Little Girl wrote:
> Miriam English wrote:
>> Little Girl wrote:
>>>   I've learned a lot through my screw-ups over the years. (:

So have I :) Most of what I first learned about Linux was through 
installing, tinkering with, and messing up installations on my personal 
box. I learned most of the basics, like the filesystem, configuration 
files and whatnot that way.

>> I couldn't agree more. Today we have a growing cultural prejudice
>> against making mistakes, but in truth is one of our most important
>> ways of learning.
> At the risk of hijacking this thread, I wonder if this sort of thing
> is partially to blame for there being fewer women than men in the
> computing industry.

I think there is a correlation there. I've read that women are less 
likely to take risks than men, and less likely to act on incomplete 
information. These are valuable skills in leadership and also useful for 
advancing in general, career-wise. Clearly, a certain level of tinkering 
runs the risk of breaking things.

On that note - I agree with others' suggestions of providing the husband 
a Linux distro on a box / virtual server which won't affect shared 
resources.

> Same here! I think you also tend to remember very clearly the more
> extreme mistakes (like the ones that wiped out precious irretrievable
> content) and never *ever* repeat them. Also, some of the mistakes
> make great stories when you're having one of those geekly gatherings
> where everyone says, "Oh yeah? You'll never believe what I
> did....." (:
>

I agree. Just last week we were swapping such stories at work. One 
co-worker told us that in his early days, he was advising someone on a 
Windows problem, and told the person they could just delete all the .dll 
files in a directory. He didn't recognize the extension, so they must be 
safe to delete. I responded with my own story -  Once upon a time, my 
inner obsessive-compulsive child compelled me to move a bunch of files 
in the root directory of a Windows 3.11 PC to a subfolder. I just wanted 
to tidy things up. This resulted in a system which wouldn't boot.

Live, break & learn.

Tracey C