Sebastian and Me

I met Sebastian on the first day of class...

We were given a project to create a blog and informed that in order to do this we must: learn how to deploy software to cloud based sever, buy a domain name, configure dns, and ssh into the server. This blog will be updated throughout the year as you complete projects, discover new resources, or if you just want to share your excitement with a recent breakthrough. Ghost will be used as your publishing platform, and DigitalOcean as your Cloud Server.

Highlighted are the words I didn’t know, and tasks I didn’t understand. We were given five days, as you can imagine, I was intimadated by this project, and rightly so.

The first day we were asked to get acquainted with our new computers and to download/install a few programs. Mine quickly took on the name Sebastian (or Basti for short), for the computer was well groomed, intelligent and a little playful. Happy and excited to have found the perfect name for Basti, I began the task of downloading and installing programs. Turns out downloading stuff is pretty much the easiest thing you can do on a computer. While installing is only slightly more difficult than downloading, I did hit a few snags. Embarrassingly, yet humorously so, overcoming those snags and successfully installing the programs gave me a false sense of confidence. Thus I went to sleep the first night content with Basti and my new relationship and satisfied with my computer prowess.

It wasn't until the second day that I realized how empty the confidence I gained truly was. Turns out that Basti can be a complete Bastard. He would hide tabs from me, and pretend as though everything was fine, then five hours later he would inform me that I had forgotten an important step that rendered my entire day useless. He would hide the cursor ONLY when I was typing in my password to ensure that I could never unlock my own documents. Basically the honeymoon stage was over but we needed to work together.

Mainly due to my classmates, and google, I was able to get the blog up and running for Friday. Working though anger, stress and poor communication, we completed the assignment but it felt like little else had been achieved. After taking a much needed break, we reunited and I began trying to better understand my computer and the project.