i have a new email address now, and i would like to change the one associated with my user name. i read somewhere that it has to do with your environment variables, but where can i change them permately?

Is your Linux machine a mail server? If so your aliases file (/etc/aliases or /etc/mail/aliases) defines e-mail aliases for the mail server. If your box isn't running a mail server and you connect to your ISP's mail server, you need to tell us which mail client you're using -- all mail clients have some way to change your default identity. I think this is what you want to do.

rather a tip on finding anything in the system that you have capacity to change.

For example, Kstars has a number of cities preinstalled. However, my house in rural Mexico is at least a minute away from the closest city. Yes, it makes no sense to worry about my ability to visually detect one minutes difference in star position when I am barely able to find the North Star. However, we Linux folks do a lot of things 'just cause'. So I took the GPS reading from my cistern, and entered it.

Later, I realized I had typed a number wrong and there is no uninstall in Kstars, at least not in that version.

Since the town name is not well known, I typed the following command:

grep -EHRs weirdcityname /

I hope that is correct, it looked through every system file for that unique city name, and finally reported where it was. I went there and edited that file to the correct numbers. It was in a really weird place, that I would never have looked at. I now have it added to my permanent list of files that I need to back up when I reinstall or install a new distro.

Just so can you find that sort of thing, if what you seek is uncommon. I have in some cases input a name ZZXXYY in an input box or some unique letter combo, and it finds that file.