This is mostly a note to myself about how to do that, so I don’t forget.

http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/19141/
http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/taxonomy/term/1/0?page=9
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mount/USB
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/en/man8/fdisk.8.html
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/hardy/man1/dd.1.html
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/2-methods-to-clone-your-linux-hard-drive/
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery
http://www.switchroot.com/how-to-recover-deleted-files-with-scalpel-ubuntu

Today is the lovely and rising rock star Taylor Momsen’s birthday.
I am here only with Logan.  Thunderstorms went through and as usual (though this one was different…. I couldn’t get into my swimsuit because it was inside out and is torn up the side…. I need a new one…. I was in the pool trying to get the solar cover on, in the rain and wind.  Later, there was an insane amount of lightning.

Which of course took down my internet service, so I decided to play Light Me Up, which I still think is one of, if not *the* best album of 2010.

At the beginning of “You” (which I played a few times today thinking of a friend whose last two years are essentially summed up in the message and meaning of that song), Logan thought it was Johnny Cash.

He was referring to his cover of Sheryl Crow’s awesome song “Redemption Day” which I have loved since it came out (along with “Anything But Down” and “If It Makes You Happy”).  Johnny Cash’s version of “Redemption Day” is on an album we often play here when my dad visits.
I love it when my dad visits.  I feel that my connection to him has always been very intense… ever since we walked into the fog after I pointed to fog and asked, “What’s that?” He said, “It’s fog.  Do you want to go in it?” and I said “YES!” and we did.  This is one of my first memories.

I think I was 4. That was very special, we walked around in it and talked about how fog was like a cloud on the ground.  It was so humid today that Logan told me the shotgun he wanted to shoot had condensation on it when he took it out of the case.  We have been discussing condensation the last two days….

I had a very special night in the fog as an adult when I took the green laser photos for Melissa Poole, an artist, friend, and Chris Stein’s ex-wife.
The green laser, and the blue LED, these were only a dream of science when I was growing up. Now they are reality.

Unrelated:
I feel a very special pride when I can explain something to my children the way that my dad explained things to me.  I’m also pleased that I can add more detail, like defining “dew point” and the relationships between volume, temperature, and pressure of gases.

I like how streams of thought lead from one thing to another to another and seem to end up in a random unrelated place, but one that reminds you of something important.

It occurred to me after I imagined that Sheryl Crow must be very proud of her work given that Johnny Cash, a musician whose work has been popular since before I was born, that there is a story about me that I don’t recall ever telling.

When I was young, I visited my grandparents (my dad’s mother and stepfather) and stayed overnight from Friday evening until Saturday afternoon (I would always watch Land of the Lost and The Pink Panther and I *loved* that Ant and the Aardvark!).

When I was 3 years old, perhaps until I was 4, I would sit in a tiny, dark brown, wooden rocking chair and play the 7″ 45 rpm single of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” over and over and over. The memory is vague, but I think it had the big hole in the center.  I don’t know why I did this, and I barely remember it.

I believe that time doesn’t really exist.
Reminder to self: write about the article talking about contingencies and continuities and how they are undetermined until they pass through the singularity known as “now” to become fixed as the past.
(Note to self 12/25/12: I did this, Walter Alvarez the guy who discovered what killed the dinosaurs.  Must find this.)
discovermagazine.com/2009/oct/26-the-man-who-discovered-what-killed-the-dinosaurs
The interesting part is on the second page.

So back to my point about time not existing.
In 1980, Blondie covered “Ring of Fire” for a movie and put it out on an LP.
Why THAT song?  Why that one?
I didn’t know about it at the time… in fact it would be years after that, when I became a Blondie collector and they became the center of my entire adult life until I realized that existed.

It just seems that there is more to it than simple coincidence that I chose THAT band, and it happened to be THAT song that I played 15 times in a row when I was just turning 4.

Hmmm.

I woke up feeling somewhat better and thinking, like many people have, that schools should teach a bunch of essential skills that everyone should know.  Many of these things are normally taught by parents, which I presume is the ungiven reason for its absence in the curriculum.
However, I’d like to point out that not everyone has their parents, and even fewer people have good ones. And even the good ones can’t always know everything that belongs in this list.

I’ve been thinking for a long time how odd it is that in middle school, everyone was taught how to use a sewing machine, even though I only know one person who even owns a sewing machine.  40 years later, they’re still teaching this to my kids.

So, in this evolving post, I’m going to collect some things in one place that I think would be more valuable and better investment of time.

The first item that came to mind to commit to the list is  “When to go to the doctor.”

You should try to know where your food comes from, and how to shop for groceries, to look at expiration dates, to read labels, about cooking safety, to buy locally when you can.

How to mail things.  Most people waste so much money because they don’t know how to mail things.  Everyone should know what a letter, a large envelope, and a package is, and what options there are to mail packages (including the online-only options).  Learn how to use the post office website and the paypal Multi-order shipping tool to save money.

People do not evaluate risk well.  It’s important to try to do a better evaluation of risk based on actual facts. For example, just because you are personally in control of your car does not mean it’s safer to drive than to fly.

Don’t ever use your teeth as a tool like to strip wire.  You need them and they will crack later in your life if you do this.

Copyright law.  Everyone should have a basic understanding of copyright, and who owns what.  Unless you are paid to do it, or you relinquish your rights, when you create something, you own it.  I’ll elaborate on this later.

If you’re eating something that’s too hot, don’t inhale to cool it off.  Exhale only, or you could end up with the food stuck in your throat and choke to death.

Sometimes stores will sell things in a big package that costs more than two smaller ones.   Look for the latest expiration date on anything that you buy.

I think that sex education in schools should be augmented with dating and relationship ed.   For example, people who are inexperienced at relationships but who are rejected will typically internalize that there is something wrong with them.  Rejection is simply a fact with no message.

Learn how to protect yourself from spam and spoof emails.  Don’t click on links that say you “won” something.  They harvest your email address and then spam you forever.  Logan’s hotmail got compromised this way, and the next day he had 2000 spams and had to permanently set it to Exclusive mode.

Before cashing personal checks, call the issuing bank and ask them to confirm that the funds are in the account.  Otherwise you may end up paying a hefty bounced check fee — for a check you didn’t even write.  Ruint.

I don’t believe that time actually exists (and many physicists who work with quantum mechanics not only believe it too, but have proven it in experiments where doing something now changes something that had already happened in the past!).  Sometimes it seems like certain things that have happened to me very far apart in time are so closely related, or so unlikely, it seems like everything happened simultaneously.  One day I’m going to have to write about that in detail but let me give you the short version…

Obviously everything does interact to some extent with a clock or a calendar, but I believe in connections and I believe that they exist without regard to time and distance, through time (and space) and that those connections are what allows us, to an extent, more of an extent than most people realize, to make our own reality. Consider this: there are six billion people on the planet. There was one person among tens of millions of Blondie fans who became friends with the band and ended up making, owning, their official web site — and it is me.

I sent [Blondie guitarist and co-founder] Chris Stein a letter (through Chrysalis Records) that I typed on an old antique typewriter (older than my grandmother) in 1984, 85 maybe…

When I ended up friends with Chris, I would visit him and stay over at his apartment in NYC and sleep in his downstairs recording studio. Around 1992, maybe 93, on one of my first visits staying over, I was looking around, fascinated, all this stuff — everywhere — on the walls, on the floor, on every horizontal surface, in cabinets and drawers and just everywhere. And I was reading stuff on the walls and just shocked: there it was, my letter. Hanging on the fucking wall, next to a letter from the late artist Vali Myers who he named his child after.  So talk about a full circle moment, all of the things that had to happen not only for the letter to even be there, but imagine the fact that *I* ended up there to SEE IT.