Take out the "ivy league" part and that post describes me pretty well. In school(just graduated in May) I excelled at the algorithmic and mathy side of computer science, but was horrible at the technological side. This really bit me in the ass when I got to a class like Operating Systems where I had to do a lot of C programming.
Anyway, from what I can tell there's really no substitute to doing a hell of a lot of programming. I've also had the thought of, "I know I'm smart, but I think I might be just inherently bad with technology", but now that I've been working full time for 6 months, and have stubbed my toes on more technologies than I did in all of school that thought comes less and less. There are still gaps in my technological knowledge, but by reading hackernews, digging more into Linux, and making projects from the ground up I've been steadily filling in those gaps. Go code and prosper!