how to reinstate oneself as drupal admin when all is lost

ha. since my first drupal msg. with administrator account went to /dev/null I had no way to log in. I deleted the record (for user 1) and created a new account - but no administrative permissions because I was now user 2. I now seem to recall having selected some unique key autoincrement thingy. Wound up exporting the table to a file, editing file by hand to force myself back to user 1, dropped all records in the table, then edited the file to leave only "INSERT" instructions behind, then imported the file which is done under the SQL tab.