UNIT 4: A New Hope?

OMG: after 22 years of fear and loathing for the command line environment*, I think this week's assignments were actually pretty straightforward!!!!!!!! For once all I needed to do was just follow the instructions exactly as written (this does not insure there will be no typos, however) and go along with it. If the remaining units of this class feature so few unpleasant surprises, I can stop shaking at the mere thought of working in Linux and relax and learn! Of course the first new user I added was "newuser" but we are going straight for functionality and not aesthetics in this class. But yeah, watch out for typos, Doug.
Have I mentioned that I work well with downloading all the assignments, printing them out and keeping them on hand? Yeah, I'm like a serial killer of trees, but there's no way around it for me. I have to check things off and cross them out and write extensive notes. Do all UNIX users need a physical notepad for this stuff? I do so far. However, I can seldom make head or tail of these notes once I am done.
It was kind of cute when I logged in under newuser and attempted to use the sudo and got reminded that I wasn't logged in as dougwelch and didn't have those admin privileges. I guess that's how we learn. But it's a lot easier to learn when you can just chuckle instead of when you are hysterical and just about ready to throw things in frustration (like the last two weeks). Just because that mouse has a tether doesn't mean you can't do some damage when you throw it out of anger/sadness/frustration.
During this unit when I was hung up, it was generally because I had miskeyed something, or had started typing while my last command was still processing/running a huge list of some kind and the last thing I was typing came up at the command prompt, I typed out the new command from the   instructions and was not aware that there were some random letters at the beginning of the line, near the command prompt. But I was able to figure it out with less emotional attachment.
Nevertheless the nice thing about the command line is that you can see what it was that you keyed in and say, "Gosh, maybe I shouldn't have typed in "sudo" twice?
Oh yeah, was that grep command new? It seems like a "find" type command. Oh it's on our cheat sheet under "searching."Nice. I hope I cna use that someday and actually get what I'm looking for.
I am hoping that I have turned some kind of a corner here. No I don't think I could talk to Neal Stephenson about programming like I could talk to him about Mediterranean geography in the era of Louie Catorce, but I'm now feeling like I can do a couple things with Ubuntu and Ubuntu Server that I couldn't do a month ago.
My fear of Linux and UNIX style OSs took a little vacation to Bora Bora while I powered through with little difficulty. If only my fear took me along to the lagoon, I might be even happier. Well, I'm grabbing my snorkel and fins and watch out for the stonefish and gars!


*I took a class in BASIC in the summer of 1982 and decided to hold off until computers got "user friendly" enough for me to comprehend them. That would be about a decade and a half later.