That's all she rote

I really enjoy the way Bruce will instruct us to do something we did weeks or even months before, and expect us to figure out how to do it again. He is very offhand as he does this, isn't he? As if he doesn't realize that most of us are going to have to go back into this video from week 2, that tutorial from week 1, the install guide from 672 (which hopefully we have, since D2L sure doesn't anymore!), and click back and forth between three different pdfs all the while. UNTIL four hours later, you successfully reach line 2 of the 9-page TechAssignment document for the week.

Obviously this is the best way to make us learn these steps on our own, and in fact I feel fortunate he walks us so carefully through the steps of each install the first time. But I always wonder, is he laughing when he writes those simple statements?

Installation of DSpace wasn't horrific for me. But the more complex an install is, the less I am able to know what the meaning of each step is, and this install was more rote than any I have done this semester. It only helped, oddly enough, to be using VirtualBox instead of VMware. This is because I learned this week that I may be the only one in our class doing this, when I discovered that my version of Linux is older than most of the other students', who installed theirs in 672. (I installed one on a VMware machine in 672 as well, but had to switch computers. Now I hope to never go back; VirtualBox is much less awkward about mouse and keyboard integration than VMware.) So I sometimes have to troubleshoot a little differently than the others, and this gets me thinking.