Admissible failures
Apr. 26th, 2010 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceReally, I was born to be a geek, but I never followed through.
I did have the heritage - grandad a bank clerk, dad an accountant, what else should I do but work with numbers? - and I had the early training too: some of my best childhood memories are going into Dad's office with him on a Saturday morning and helping (for values of help that, looking back, I continue to think were actually helpful: mostly working endless columns of figures through his adding machines, which I adored), and when I was eight I learned my first computer language (does anybody else remember KDF9?) and wrote programmes for the Oxford University computer. In the days when there was just the one. Actually what I most remember is the single typo that cost us a week's work - how early we learn the importance of proofreading, the value of pedantry! - but that too was a highlight of my kidhood.
And then I lost it all. My family fell apart, and my education likewise; I knew more maths then than I ever have since, and mostly what I know is how much I've lost.
These days, I approach computers with that sort of brash bluff that covers deep insecurity. I was genuinely confident and fairly capable back in the '80s, in the dear dead days of DOS; I loved command-line computing, and like to blame the dread Mac/Windows axis of evil for my loss of competence since. I've been a Linux user for a decade now, but I never really learned it; I aspire to geekhood, but don't put in the effort. Mostly I cheat and fumble, sometimes I have to yell for help.
If I were a proper geek, I would read the manual and then not actually expect everything to work that way, be prepared to get my hands dirty, look forward to grubbling around in the innards of the system. Which I would, if I knew what I were doing: but I don't. As witness:
I need a new video driver, to run my new monitor properly. I found it, I downloaded it, I figured out how to make the shell script run the auto-installer - and it fell over. Couldn't find a necessary file in the path, installation failed. Augh!
Poking again around the internets, I found a web page that said no, the autoinstaller won't work in Suse - which is the Linux distribution of my choice - while the X-server is running, so you'd need to drop to a lower runlevel. Alternatively, and recommended, install the driver via Suse's own installation system.
So I did that: or at least I told Suse where to look for the proper driver, and away we went. Download, installation - and it fell over. Couldn't find a necessary library or some such, installation failed. Double-augh!!
If I were a true geek, see, I would fix this. As it is, I just get angry - this is a clean installation of the distro, I'm downloading the distro-specific iteration of the driver, it ought to Just Work, damn it! - and then do something reckless. Specifically, go all rooty and dive into the generic driver I'm actually using, holding my breath while I change resolutions and refresh rates manually, down in the deep there where you can actually do damage if you get things wrong.
And everything seems to be working now, and that is good enough; I don't really need fancy effects, so long as the image fits the screen without distortion. But I am aware how ungeeky that is in me, to be satisfied with "good enough", with a botch job on a generic driver; and I regret that.
Still. Two computers, four operating systems, one monitor. It's good enough.
Now I'm going to turn everything off and rationalise the cables and the plugging. Will somebody please remove these cats...?
I did have the heritage - grandad a bank clerk, dad an accountant, what else should I do but work with numbers? - and I had the early training too: some of my best childhood memories are going into Dad's office with him on a Saturday morning and helping (for values of help that, looking back, I continue to think were actually helpful: mostly working endless columns of figures through his adding machines, which I adored), and when I was eight I learned my first computer language (does anybody else remember KDF9?) and wrote programmes for the Oxford University computer. In the days when there was just the one. Actually what I most remember is the single typo that cost us a week's work - how early we learn the importance of proofreading, the value of pedantry! - but that too was a highlight of my kidhood.
And then I lost it all. My family fell apart, and my education likewise; I knew more maths then than I ever have since, and mostly what I know is how much I've lost.
These days, I approach computers with that sort of brash bluff that covers deep insecurity. I was genuinely confident and fairly capable back in the '80s, in the dear dead days of DOS; I loved command-line computing, and like to blame the dread Mac/Windows axis of evil for my loss of competence since. I've been a Linux user for a decade now, but I never really learned it; I aspire to geekhood, but don't put in the effort. Mostly I cheat and fumble, sometimes I have to yell for help.
If I were a proper geek, I would read the manual and then not actually expect everything to work that way, be prepared to get my hands dirty, look forward to grubbling around in the innards of the system. Which I would, if I knew what I were doing: but I don't. As witness:
I need a new video driver, to run my new monitor properly. I found it, I downloaded it, I figured out how to make the shell script run the auto-installer - and it fell over. Couldn't find a necessary file in the path, installation failed. Augh!
Poking again around the internets, I found a web page that said no, the autoinstaller won't work in Suse - which is the Linux distribution of my choice - while the X-server is running, so you'd need to drop to a lower runlevel. Alternatively, and recommended, install the driver via Suse's own installation system.
So I did that: or at least I told Suse where to look for the proper driver, and away we went. Download, installation - and it fell over. Couldn't find a necessary library or some such, installation failed. Double-augh!!
If I were a true geek, see, I would fix this. As it is, I just get angry - this is a clean installation of the distro, I'm downloading the distro-specific iteration of the driver, it ought to Just Work, damn it! - and then do something reckless. Specifically, go all rooty and dive into the generic driver I'm actually using, holding my breath while I change resolutions and refresh rates manually, down in the deep there where you can actually do damage if you get things wrong.
And everything seems to be working now, and that is good enough; I don't really need fancy effects, so long as the image fits the screen without distortion. But I am aware how ungeeky that is in me, to be satisfied with "good enough", with a botch job on a generic driver; and I regret that.
Still. Two computers, four operating systems, one monitor. It's good enough.
Now I'm going to turn everything off and rationalise the cables and the plugging. Will somebody please remove these cats...?