Mine is wear a medical grade mask in public spaces.

It does multiple things.

First it protects you from air borne pathogens like viruses and especially COVID.

Second, if you are confronted or people get mad at you for wearing one, it immediately let’s you know what kind of people are around. If they’re the type that will get mad at you for wearing a mask, it’s definitely a place to leave and avoid in the future. A mask is a great way to weed people out in public.

My wife has lifelong lung problems now and we can’t risk any infections. So wearing a mask is necessary for me … and at this point in my life, it’s normal now and I find that it’s normal for most people. 90% of the people that see me in a mask notice but immediately understand and don’t make an issue of it. It’s 10% of the loudest idiots that make it a problem and a mask is a great way to unmask them (pun intended)

+1 for The Chrysalids … read it on English class in high school and loved it

Agreed … but if your new partner had been with 843 other people, it increases the chances of something being passed on … like a South East Asian ad for a gambling website in Singapore that offers me three free spins.

It’s like asking a new sex partner if it’s OK to not use a condom.

“Don’t worry, me and all my 843 previous partners are all clean”

Swappable hard drives

I have a ThinkPad with easy access to the hard drive. It’s one screw, remove a small panel and slide out the hard drive, slide in a new hard drive and reinstall the panel and screw. It all takes about a minute.

I have a drive for my Linux setup and another for windows.

I gave up setting up dual boot setups because I’m not as skilled or capable and I’ve lost entire setups in the past due to updates and changes and it was constantly frustrating for me. So I figured that just swapping hard drives was the easiest for me. No configuration, no changes and neither OS can interfere with one another.

I use my Linux as my daily driver for everything and windows when I need something from windows. I only ever use windows maybe once a month or once every second month. I spend more time regularly updating windows than in actually using it.

And cause uncontrollable diarrhea

For a guy fighting against terminal cancer with no hope of help, he sure was quick to use euthanasia on someone that could have had lots of options in treatment.

I’m up in Canada and we have the same problem with SSN … as a kid one of my uncles told me that the SSN is only for government use and nothing else … he explained that even banks shouldn’t ask for it as it is not required. He helped me set up my first bank account when I was 15 and he insisted and fought with the bank branch that SSN were not required. After a bit of back and forth, they finally agreed and I got my first bank account … which I’ve kept ever since over 30 years ago. And in all that time, I’ve protected my SSN from banks and credit services. Because I was able to start that first account, I could start new ones and grow from there.

Best part was … about ten years after that, I got my first Credit Card and the form the bank gave asked me to verify my information … INCLUDING MY FULL SSN WHICH THEY HAD IN THEIR RECORDS.

The privacy and security of these dumb SSN cards and numbers is a joke.

Teach her to say “I was born on a pirate ship”

Once she’s able to say it properly, tell her to open her mouth with a finger at each corner and say the phrase again. Get her to shout it out

Then tell her to show her new trick to mom and dad.

Then once they got it just right, let them sing it all week.

Once the week goes by … teach them 99 bottles of pop on the wall

The simple quiet of a warm summer afternoon. I’m watching one right now on a deck over looking a rocky yard and a small lake nearby.

I grew up poor and never knew it until I grew older. We had enough but never enough for luxuries. In the summer I’d have a breakfast of tea and toast and be gone all day. I would go home for a small lunch and that was all the food I had and I never cared.

On days like today, I would just go roaming around everywhere with my friends. Like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn we’d just be outside doing nothing and everything all day long.

I’m in my 40s now, my bones ache, I tire easily and my friends are long gone either on their own path or gone from this life.

I miss those days and I miss my friends.

As an indigenous person who grew up without running water or modern plumbing for the first ten years of my life in Canada … I always appreciated this quote …

Will Durant Quote: “From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.”

Personality, presence and confidence

Natural self confidence, but NOT an arrogant selfish confidence.

Some people naturally have confidence and presence and some people need to build it as a skill.

I know guys and gals with little to no knowledge or skill build up careers because they just knew how to talk and connect to people.

I also know guys and gals with years of education and degrees but have little to no way of politely or easily getting along with people.

Same here … last time, I took a tablet and watched two full movies of my own choosing that I wanted to watch. Instead of having the choice of 10 whatever movies that the airline has available, I got to watch what I wanted for the 7 hour flight. The rest of the time, I just slept.

Best combination - your own tablet loaded with your own videos and audio and a good pair of noise cancelling headphones.

Make sure to download all content before the flight to work offline, load it all and test it the day before the flight. Disconnect the tablet from the internet and leave it disconnected. (The first time I did this, I loaded tons of Spotify content, didn’t test it beforehand and couldn’t access any of it on the eight hour flight).

Best way to do it is to just download audio and video files that are not tied to any service like Netflix/Amazon/Spotify/whatever.

Give yourself hours of content to choose from.

Have a nice flight.

I’ve been on Linux for about 15 years now … I’m no pro and I’ve never really advanced in anything with the terminal

I tried doing stuff years ago but then I came at a crossroad … either spend my life learning the dark arts of the terminal and all the details of how every major system works … reinstall every time I have a new problem that I caused … or just leave everything alone and never tweak or adjust anything.

For the past few years, I just install the latest stable version of anything I use and never bother touching or tweaking anything … never had a problem since.

Simple and to the point, everyone should know and follow this. One of the best pieces of advice from the Dalai Lama

“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.”

I grew up in a very unorganized town that wasn’t really regulated with traffic laws. I learned to drive a truck at about 12.

When I was 14 I was driving my dad’s truck around town. I suddenly had the urge to see how well the brakes worked. I drove fast down a gravel road than slammed on the brakes as hard as I could. Within seconds it blew both front brake lines.

Later that same year in the winter I got the truck stuck on some ice. It wasn’t bad, I just happened to stop on a very slippery patch of ice and couldn’t move forward. I got the idea that as the tires spun, they were getting hot which meant it was melting the ice. If I did it long enough I would eventually get down to the gravel. I got impatient and spun the wheels faster smoking them like crazy while the engine roared. In the middle of the noise and smoke, a tire exploded and the truck jumped and deflated. I had blown out a tire.

Dad wasn’t happy with me for a long while because the truck went to the shop and we had to pay a lot of money to get them fixed.

At the very least, I never made these mistakes again.

Me fail English? … That’s unpossible

Theorists and futurologists refer to it as the ‘Great Filter’ … a series of challenges that civilizations go up against which determines if they make it past the filter or not.

Our current filters are climate change, nuclear war and artificial intelligence … will we use nuclear tech or AI to benefit ourselves? Will we work towards dealing with climate change? or will us acting negatively with all this be the cause of our regression … or destruction?

We have equal capability at this point … we are just as capable of collectively solving these problems … or using them to destroy ourselves.

Our collective futures are most definitely in our own hands … whether or not we use those hands for good or ill is up to us.