^U is for “Save User Defaults”, that’s ~/.B.blend. <- This sentence is Unix language, not English :).
The second thing is, that you perhaps could make use of an Empty (or the plane itself - whatever you want), and then make the camera track it (^T / Ctrl-T). That’s what I normally do.
I still have a very “conservative” .B.blend, since many people seem to rely on it when describing stuff in tutorials / chats / etc.
I always planned to have a default .blend with an empty mesh having correctly named bones and a pre built armature with the same bone names.
I just end up editing old files.