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

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

TraceyC wrote:
> Little Girl wrote:
> > Miriam English 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 wonder if that's true of all of us, if we were to take a poll. (:
 
> > 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.

Some of us don't mind taking some risks and breaking things.

I was in a mostly male industry in my job (not with computers), and I
have to admit that I put unreasonable pressure on myself because I
believed I had to be at least as good at it as a man (if not better)
to prove that I had the right to do it. I loved my job, but any tasks
that were difficult were a thousand times more difficult because of
that self-imposed pressure. I often wonder whether that - or the
thought of that - is what keeps some women away from a career in
computers, although until I saw the messages about it, it hadn't even
occurred to me that some of us weren't interested in these divine
toys. (:

> 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, and may he cause many happy implosions on the thing. (:

> > 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.

LOL! I can identify with that since one of my first experiences as a
brand new Linux user was getting rid of all the files with "ubuntu"
in their names from my Kubuntu machine in an attempt to clean it of
anything but itself, only to discover that I had gutted it. (:

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.