Sometimes You Just Feel Dumb

Ok... before starting brief inventory of the house:

• Daughter is currently taking a nap
• Dishes and toys are all picked up
• Dinner is planned and I just need to reheat and make the vegetable
• Laundry that was left to sit to long wet is being rewashed on hot with vinegar to get rid of the musty smell.
• Junk hot spots were worked on.
  
• Floor should be swept... but isn't that crunchy

Ok.. it looks like I have a few minutes to work on this business. Right now I'm in the middle of getting my technical environment running on my virtual test machine. So far I have VMware installed and Fedore Core 6 (linux) installed on a virtual machine. It was not as easy as I planned. I got the install finished and my test system wouldn't boot. I had to update my copy of VMware to fix a bug and try again. Finally after some hair pulling I had a working system... kind of.

After my install my virtual machine was crawling slow. I was ready to pull my hair out all over again and buy a real test system. I hadn't even started any of the software I needed so I couldn't figure out what was wrong. Luckily I off handedly mentioned the problem to my husband. This is the point where it really pays to talk to other people (preferably experts) about the problems you are having before you make any rash decisions. He glanced over at my computer for about 3 seconds and goes, "What's it worth to you to have your performance fixed?" At this point I paused... cause I could tell from the gleam in his eye he knew exactly what was going on... and I was going to feel really really dumb for not figuring it out. I finally push down my pride and go, "Ok, what's wrong?" Two minutes later I had a nice fast system.

Now what had I done wrong? I'd left my virtual test system running it's windows like environment. If you aren't technical think of it this way. My computer is a painter that is making a picture on the screen. By leaving that environment running on the test machine I was asking the painter to create two different pictures, one with each hand. No wonder it was swamped. All my husband had to do was switch the virtual system to a text environment and my performance issues were gone.

So what lesson did I learn today? Sometimes you will just feel dumb and that's ok. The smart thing to do is surround yourself with lots of other smart people you can ask for help. Even in areas where you think you know what you are doing you might still miss the obvious. (Especially if you've been up half the night with a sick toddler.) Make sure you have good sounding boards for your ideas and use them often.