Ever stumble across something that just completely blows your mind? It’s either a complete joy or something totally freaky when that happens. Had it happen to me just the other night when I was watching THE BIG LEBOWSKI for about the 800th time. My favorite scene came on – the “Gutterballs” mini-drug-powered-movie-dream that The Dude has in the middle of the movie. If you’ve not seen LEBOWSKI yet, well, I’m just gonna leave this right here for your education and enjoyment:

Now, if you know me at all, you know I’m prone to getting earworms, and then having that earworm stay lodged in my noodle for days at a time. Well, the theme to “Gutterballs” was no exception, and it got wedged in there for at least two days. My usual fix for this is to just buy the damn song on iTunes and play it incessantly for a couple of days until I want to vomit, so I started figuring out who sang the damn thing so I could give the Ghost of Steve Jobs my 99 cents.

Imagine my shock when I learned that this song about dropping acid, this hip, bluesy, Doors-sounding tune was recorded by none other than KENNY ROGERS. That’s right. “The Gambler” dropped acid before he developed a gambling problem. As someone who grew up in the 70s in a house that listened to a metric buttload of country music, this pretty much blew my mind. That is, until I found out that the guy who rocked the guitar on that was GLEN CAMPBELL. The guy that did the song “Rhinestone Cowboy” from the 70s whipped out this jewel of 60s rock. The last piece of the puzzle was finding out that the producer of the song was MIKE POST. If you’re not familiar with that name, he’s the guy responsible for just about every action-based TV show’s theme song in the 80s. Yep, the guy that composed the A-Team theme produced this song.

Finding out all of this made me look like The Dude for a minute or two while my brain adjusted itself to a hip Kenny Rogers in the universe:

As The Dude would say: “That’s wild, man, you know? Just wild.”

And in case you don’t believe me, check out Kenny Rogers and First Edition rocking “Just Dropped In” live in the video below. I’m gonna go fix a White Russian and just groove, man.

My New Year’s Resolution is going to be 1920x1200. Widescreen is best.

OK, outside of the geeky joke – it’s a new year, and with a new year comes new promises that I can make, break, and then guilt myself over. I’m good for about two weeks then I fall apart like a house of cards being sprayed with a firehose, but this year, it’s going to be different, dammit. I’m going to CHANGE! cough

So, without further flimflammery, here’s the list of crap that I intend to do this year, in no particular order:

• Blog more. I have been hit and miss on blogging all year long, so I want to write at least one blog post a week. That’s 52 in a year. I can do that. I just need to be consistent and not lazy.

• Journal more. I’ve got some amazingly cool journalling tools that I’ve got setup to do all kinds of things, and aside from automated snarfing of my social feeds I don’t do much independent journalling. This will happen daily - it’s easy enough to do, I just need to do it.

• Lose a couple of tons. I’d lost 20 pounds back in August, but most of that was due to having pneumonia. I’ve put 10 of that back on - I need to get back a healthier bandwagon.

• Find my patience. I used to be a lot more mellow than I am today. I need to recover my mellow. Part of me wants to blame others for damaging my calm, but I know that I can maintain a mellow despite any ruckus that may be cycloning around me.

• Write more. I submitted four articles for Linux Journal this year, and that’s not nearly enough to make me “feel like a writer” these days.

• Have more fun. 2013 was full of stress and angst on a few fronts, and I am not happy about that. 2014 is going to be better, because I’m going to make it better.

Come at me, 2014. I’m gonna kick your ass.

I just realized I haven’t posted here since AUGUST. Jeez. I get one little disease and completely fall off the internet…

Been hanging out on the social media thing slightly more sporadically than I’ve been blogging, but even that’s not much. Heck, I’ve even fallen out of the habit of journalling, and that takes almost no time at all. Well, fear not, dear readers… (hopefully there are more out there than one of you!) – I’ve got at least three blog ideas written down, and I’m feeling the urge to spill my grey matter out over these virtual pages again.

So if you’ve missed me spouting my particular brand of nonsense, you don’t have long to wait. And if I don’t make good on that promise, just give me no end of shit on any of the networks I hang out on. Please. Someone’s gotta keep me honest.

So, back in February, I won a Nexus 7 tablet at the SCALE11x conference. After receiving the tablet, I fiddled with it a bit, then promptly wrote a Linux Journal article about it, then pretty much shelved the little guy.

Recently, I pulled it out, charged it up, and started playing with it again. Despite my affinity for iOS for things like tablets and phones, I find the Nexus 7 experience to be pretty darn smooth. The keyboard does make me twitch, mostly due to the layout differences between it and iOS, but I find myself hauling the Nexus 7 around the house a bit more. I’ve discovered a few things about using the Nexus 7 that are pretty neat:

• Crossplatform apps like Evernote are available, which helps ease the pain of just picking the device up and getting to my data.

• The Amazon app works great as an e-reader, just like it does on the iPad and iPhone. It’s great to jump from Kindle, to iPad, to Nexus 7, to iPhone and just pick up where I left off in the same book.

• Dropbox, Copy, Cubby, Box, and Google Drive all have Android clients, so any data I drop “in the cloud” can be accessed on the Nexus. Nice to know.

• There’s a read-only 1Password program which seems to get the job done, if not awesomely. Would love for it to be a full 1Password client.

• DroidEdit is a pretty decent text editor. Matter of fact, I’m using it right now to write this blog post – from the Nexus 7.

• There’s a Zinio app for Android, which is awesome, cause I can read HOT ROD magazine on it.

• There’s also a Marvel Unlimited app for Android, so I can just cruise thru old Marvel Comics issues on a whim. For .CBR based comic-archives, there’s Komik or Perfect Viewer which get the job done.

• Fair amount of good free games, like Jetpack Joyride, Real Racing 3, Angry Birds, and Heroes of Order and Chaos. Plenty of things to do to kill time.

However, there’s a fair share of things that DO annoy me:

• No “Drafts” app for Android. Drafts is an app that I use ALL the time on iOS, and it annoys me that it’s not available for the Nexus 7.

• Likewise, there’s no Day One journalling app. Yeah, I know there are journalling apps, but I use Day One on iOS and Mac, and I’m not going to change the format now.

• Apps that just flat out don’t work on the Nexus 7, despite them being Android tablet apps. I’m looking at you, DirecTV.

• All the Google-isms make me twitch a little, particularly with the PRISM stuff going on. But it’s as close to ‘pure’ Android as one can get, even if it does want to talk to the Big G every couple minutes. Dunno about that.

In all, though, it’s a neat little device. If I only had a couple hundred dollars and I wanted to buy a tablet, I’d pick one up. It’s worth it, despite the fact that it’s not iOS. ;)

I’m cooped up inside at my desk… but right now, I’d rather be this guy, hauling butt at ludicrous speed:

Fresh air would be amazing right about now.