Knowing more doing less

In the 1990s, all books in intercultural communication started with "we have never seen so much international travel / globalization". In the 2000s, all computer mediated communication books went on about never-before-seen ways to interact online. And in the first week of the 2010s (that The Economist suggests we call "teens", "decadents" or "debtcade") I managed to screw up in an entirely new, novel, never-before-possible way.

I have been talking about the software stack; and how depending on your geekiness you either live at the very top of it or you can actually penetrate its murky depths. The stack situation, in the great scheme of things, is a consequence of the division of labor and specialization. Even the geekiest nerds don't know every element of the stack. Generally, any modern household, vehicle, appliance, is a stack where the user knows only the top layer. It used to be that a peasant could fix the tools of his trade himself. There was nothing mysterious about a sickle. A John Deere tractor is a different story.

So armed with a minimal knowledge of server technology, I spent the last week of the "oughts" setting up a Mac OS X server - all the way from network connections and DNS records to remote administration, databases, and active PHP applications. And then I managed to lock myself out of one of my accounts; and decided to re-install everything.

It was all going well in the beginning - faster than before, because now I knew what I was doing. But it all went to hell in a hand basket when it was time to set up the database server. You start the MySQL daemon with a click of a mouse; but then you have to use a third party program like Navicat to create users and databases. The first time I was doing the server setup, I looked it up online, found an answer that worked, and was creating databases in five minutes. But the second time was different. I still didn't know how to set up the database server; but I knew more about the whole process - enough to be doing the Google search for instructions with different terms, enough to not be able to find the solution that had worked before. So knowing more about the process was actually counterproductive.