My Adapting To The Internet

Upon entering the classroom the very first day, I was filled with trepidation. Traffic Psychology done on the Internet... What on earth was that? The traffic psychology part intrigued me, BUT the Internet scared me to death! I had never really, until this class, worked on a computer. I purchased my first computer just two weeks prior to the beginning of class, so up until the first day of class my experience had been playing computer games and writing letters to my family. I felt like I was in a foreign land and I couldn't speak the language. Everything said in class went over my head, but I kept writing things down in hopes that as soon as I began working on the computer it would all make sense. Although, I had felt a sense of dread and doom upon entering the class, I decided that if I was to ever learn anything about computers I'd have to hold my breath and dive in. And thus my journey began...

Week1

In our first class we learned about uhunix, pine, e-mail and the commands that accompanied these systems. This scared the devil out of me because, as stated earlier, I knew nothing about computers. I felt a little hope in the knowledge that most of my classmates claimed to know very little about computers too. We were given the assignment to practice using the commands we had learned. My head was awhirl trying not to forget anything that was explained in class.

Well, upon entering the computer lab for the first time, my stomache was in knots because I just knew that I would make some horrendous mistake and embarass myself. Sure enough, right from the get-go I had trouble. I could not even figure out how to connect to uhunix from the lab. Luckily the lab monitors are very nice, thus I was not totally mortified. After I connected, I began practicing the commands and found them to be quite simple to execute. So far so good.

Week 2

This week I faced the first of many, many frustrations. I went and picked up the copy of the software required to do work from home. I was extremely pleased we could work from home because I do not have a lot of extra time to spend here at school and I live so far away that it is not convienient to run over here to complete assignments. Needless to say, my elation at the prospect of working from home was short lived. I ran into so many complications getting set up. The first complication was that the software instructions were written for windows 3.1 not windows 95. Once that mess was straightened out, I discovered that it was next to impossible to connect from home; the lines were always busy or there was no carrier. The no carrier phenomenon bothered me the most because it just teased you into thinking you would connect because it actually rang.

In class we were given the preliminary instructions for our first report. These instructions, at first seemed pretty simple; we would just report on our impressions of the previous generations writing. Then it became more complicated. We had to type in all kinds of commands just to make our reports look like regular word processing. What was I getting myself into? I had serious thoughts about giving up and dropping the class, but I knew that if I didn't stick it out I would be letting my computer-phobia get the better of me.

Week 3

This week I still faced my ever increasing frustration with the connection problem. I could not seem to get in from home, so I was beginning to make the labs on campus my second home. I did like the searching process; I loved to find cool pages other people had made. I especially liked to read about other people's frustrations, to know that I was not alone. I also learned this week that Netscape does not seem to want to connect to host from my house, so that the few times I did manage to connect, I was unable to just click back and forth like Dr.James has said in class. That was a real pain in the neck.

The class work this week was a little less scary. Dr. James took the time to explain the differences between our uhunix and CSS acounts. This explanation really helped out. We also learned about links and anchors. This beginning explanation triggered the panic button in my head, especially when Dr.James said that he didn't always get them right tthe first time, but I tried to quell my fears by convincing myself not to panic until I had at least tried it.

Week 4

This week we received the details of our assignments. We were to create six pages and maintain them. Panic hit me again. This was a lot of work and a lot of time. I was already working my fingers to the bone, suffering from eyestrain and a stiff neck. What next?! The work itself did not seem to be too difficult, it was just the time constraints I was under and the fact that the time I do have available to work on the computer is eaten away by hours of just attempting to connect to the Pearl server. I guess my theme for this class thus far would have to be either Stress or Frustration.

Week 5 and Beyond

Well, I do take some pride in the fact that I've made it this far. Things had started seeming a little clearer to me; I was beginning to understand. I was working really hard and had all my pages started, had report one just about done on a diskette, and had begun to scribble down notes for report two. I was feeling pretty good about my breakthroughs with computers until I hit some major setbacks. Setback #1: Getting told I would have received an F had my work been graded at that point. This was a big blow to my ego and I felt it did not reflect the amount of time and effort I had been putting into this class. I had been staying at the labs on campus and neglecting many other things I had to do in order to stay caught up in this class. I was trying to combat my frustration at not being able to connect at home by staying at school longer. Setback #2: Electricity failure. I had a whole day free (for once) to devote entirely to this site. Mother nature had other things in store for me. We had a really bad storm and we lost electricity for 13 hours and to make matters worse, my computer room had a leak and it was flooding. Luckily, there was no electricity because all my computer cords were sitting in a puddle of water. Anyway, even after the lights came back on, I had to let the room dry out. Setback #3:The last minute odds and ends. The weekend this whole project is due I devoted several hours to finishing up a few details on my site, to include uploading this report. Everytime I would successfully get connected from my house, something would happen to freeze me out and I would lose everything I had just done. After I took a break from the frustration, I went back and spent about 6 hours trying to get reconnected. No such luck, but I should have known better. I had to drive the 25 minutes to the campus,wait around for an available computer and finish my work here. I guess I would have to summarize my experience with the Internet as one of extreme frustration, anger and distress.

Conclusion

As I await my grade, I am again filled with trepidation. I am no longer afraid of facing the unknown because I had confronted my computer-phobia and come out quite well. I walked into the first class terribly frightened and computer illiterate, now, although I still have a lot to learn, I have come a long way relatively quickly. I am very proud of the strides I've taken in this class and how much better I am at dealing with the Internet; now fear will no longer hold me back. I just worry that the grade I receive will not reflect the tremendous amount of time,effort, and strain I have put into this project. A little advice I can offer future generations is to just face your fears with a lot of hard work and perseverence. If I can do it you most certainly can too.
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