It’s official. Computers are frustrating as all get-out. I mean, when the instructor of a web programming class is going through an online demo as part of a lecture and spends a large chunk of time stumbling through that demo before the first morning break on Wednesday because files or permissions get cross-eyed, it’s frustrating.
So should I feel so bad that I’m going through times when I struggle to keep up with lab exercises, even when I’m following step-by-step instructions? Maybe not.
Yep, computers are stupid. I must be a glutton for punishment in continuing to try and find work in this field.
It was almost comical early Wednesday morning when the instructor herself, working online back on the East Coast, was stepping through her demonstration on how to pull data tables into a web page — something I’m sure she’s done countless times and knows how to do it as well as she knows her own children — and tries to run the application and it blows up … not once, not twice, but three times. She had to go through a Plan B and a Plan C in order to just show us how the data would appear on a screen in an update mode.
Fun times. It didn’t exactly give me warm-and-fuzzy feelings going into the after-lunch lab time. All I could do was my best.
The good news is that apparently I don’t have to finish a lab module before moving on to the next one, I can go back to ones I haven’t finished yet and complete them later. But the course seems so hurried, designed for more experienced web-based programmers … I need to start from absolute scratch, and even though this is supposed to be an introductory course I can tell that I need to go way back to the very basics, which this doesn’t do.
I did some checking around and found a book just for me, a “dummy” — Visual Studio 2010 All-in-One For Dummies. More good news — one of the Barnes and Noble book stores close to where I’ll be needing to go has a copy of it on hand. I’m snappin’ that puppy up!
I’m starting to feel like I’m putting more pressure on myself than I need to. That wouldn’t be a new thing for me. It’s like one of my best friends in the world tells me, so many times — RRRRREEEEELLLLAAAAX! This is a friend who seems to know me all too well, and knows just what it takes — just what to say — to get me to do that. I can just about imagine him saying that now.
Later on, that “relaxation mindset” worked wonders. I took the pressure off of myself, stopped overwhelming myself, and managed to make it completely through our first lab assignment of the afternoon — the most critical one of the day.
Yeah … RRRRREEEEELLLLAAAAX! That works.
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