Peanuts, Castle Wolfenstein, and Me

Accessing the remote desktop and playing with commands in the terminal brought back some memories for me. I can still recall Computer Basic class, my freshman year, writing little programs that calculated compound interest and that repeated my name infinitely. Also, playing Castle Wolfenstein if we finished early. We were on little Apples with dark brown screens and amber text (weeeee, not the usual green, we thought we were cool, but we so, so weren't). So typing in commands, yeah, I can remember that.

Of course, what I'm doing now is a bit more complicated than

10 HOME

20 PRINT "Valerie Kittell";

30 GOTO 20

Or whatever Basic was, I can't really remember any more. I got a C in that class and am still pretty bitter about it because I really, really tried and my teacher just sat there at the front of the room reading paperbacks.

Anyway, command lines. My usual technique when starting something new is kind of a cross between Linus and Lucy. By that I mean, like Linus, I start by trying to learn more about what I'm doing. But I temper that with a bit of Lucy, and try to jump into the action a bit sooner than Linus would.

So, I went through the Arthur Griffith tutorials and took notes as I listened. That took forever, I gotta say, but it always does if you try to take notes during reading/video watching. But since it usually helps me learn better by writing down (I have to know what I'm writing), I kept at it. The Learning the Shell articles I printed, as Bruce suggested, and that's where Lucy came in! I opened the remote desktop and  worked through the Learning the Shell sections as I read, referring back to my Arthur Griffith notes (and using Arthur Griffith's voice to "speak" the text in my mind). And Linus popped back up as I added more notes to a new Command Line page, which may or may not end up being useful as there are no doubt better lists already online.

I was just grateful Charlie Brown didn't ever show up. That's when you give good faith, honest efforts but the world conspires against you. I did have one incident regarding the mv command, trying to move a file from one directory to the other. I figured it out (Linus-style, by researching on the Internet) before I resorted to Lucy's solution (drop kicking the computer). Overall, I was fairly pleased with my rudimentary understanding and performance.

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