>The way to acquire that skill is simply to do it over and over again I would totally agree with you on this one because of my personal experience. I'm no CS g

>The way to acquire that skill is simply to do it over and over again I would totally agree with you on this one because of my personal experience. I'm no CS guy, and nuking a VPS repeatedly (screwing up because typing a / instead of a ./ kind of errors) and installing a LAMP stack and CMS software has made me proficient even in the finer points of LAMP (like memory utilization of mysqld, or number of processes in PHP). Because of this, I am way more comfortable with linux as well. You wouldn't believe, I've destroyed installations like no tomorrow. And even on the personal front, more often than not, I tend to screw up my hardware and then with a great incentive to try and make it work again I read man pages, google every possible stuff to get it fixed. This automatically results in me knowing EXACTLY what to do when someone's screwed their hardware and are terrified. So, actually I think I should say, "Not afraid of breaking things, AND (most importantly) have determination to fix them up again."