What you need to do early is get comfortable with uncertainty and confident in your ability to seek and find the information you need. The internal workings of your computer can be a paralyzingly daunting subject at first, but that very computer also provides the tools that allow you to comprehend it at a rate unavailable in other fields.

You need to start getting to know how to use a text editor as Drake says “sooner than later”. As such I couldn’t justify going any further without teaching you how to use my best friend in the robot world, emacs.

Your capacity for exploration is limited. Your curious impulses are stunted. Your decision making process, while well established and fine-tuned by the sheer number of products pushed in your face on a daily basis, is nonetheless contingent on having the options clearly and plainly presented to you.

You will have no such luxuries in the shell. Nobody is watching what you do, nobody is there to help you along or to hold you back. All the information you could ever want is available to you, but no-one will help you find it.

Facebook is rolling out with a new e-mail API that will allow organizations and business to directly collect user e-mail addresses. Facebook will also be getting rid of the boxes feature, as well as cutting the maximum width of their custom Facebook tabs from 760px to 520px, essentially forcing developers and designers who work on Facebook (like me) to retroactively re-do all of our previous, wider-than-520px, work on Facebook. Not fun.

Every Monday for the next 9.5 months I’ll put out another short, digestible article for your consumption that will slowly build your knowledge base to the point that you can competently command and control your personal computer as well as any remote machine. I’ll teach you how to troubleshoot and customize a web server and a database. I’ll give you an introduction to all the tools you’ll need and a basic fluency that will let you provide value for either your own projects or a client’s.

As Theron and Queen Gorgo said in the 300: “This will not be over quickly. You will not enjoy this.”