The Lewis Show

This is a two bird one stone post. Well, three actually, but I'm too tired to count that high: I wanted to post something for today, I wanted to plug a site worthy of an RSS subscription, and I wanted to send out some congratulations to the writer. We've all at least thought of doing it... The Oatmeal  is a web comic and updated by Matthew Inman. His hilarious take on life's annoyances won me over long ago. Today Tumblr (which I've mentioned recently) agreed to take one of his comics and use it for their 503 page. So if (or when) Tumblr goes down, people will see one of his drawings. So kudos and long live The Oatmeal..... ......by subscribing, and checking out his book which comes out soon. Linkage: The Oatmeal Wikipedia The Oatmeal

This has to have been one of the most intense weeks of my working life. I needed a good laugh so I dug through into my subscriptions and found something that's been around for a while. Garfield - Garfield is a clever strip which simply removes Garfield the cat out of his own comic. What's left is Jon Arbuckle, occasionally Odie, and hilarity. Lasagna! Link: Garfield Minus Garfield

Honestly, this is more like site of the month, since I do this so rarely, but I couldn't pass this one up. A lot of us have smart phones now, most of them are iPhones. One of the great features of the iPhone is their autocorrect, it can be pretty smart. One of it's biggest comedic flaws is also the autocorrect. Damn You, Autocorrect , takes us all on a journey into hilarity as people are left to answer for their phone's tragic spell correction. I say this is very much worth the RSS subscription at least. It'll make your ducking day!

I couldn't close out the year without one more plug. I know I haven't waxed nostaligic this year either, but that's because this year has gone too fast and it won't sink in that this year much less this decade is already gone. So I leave 2009 with Anti Duck Face . You probably already know what duckface is. It usually involves orange girls around the NJ Turnpike, but it's spreading like a bad rash. As we go into a new year, I can only ask us all this one favor. Stop making that stupid, stupid, STUPID face. Happy New Years everyone!

With everything being so dreary this week as Ida slowly makes her way across the east coast, I figured my pick this week for a picture blog that always gives me the warm fuzzies anytime there's a new post. My Milk Toof was created by Inhae Lee and features the adventures of two teeth (it's not as weird as it sounds) named ickle and Lardee. It's become a very popular blog and now these two famous molars have a book out which has already sold out of it's first publication. This just goes to show you can find success in the strangest places. Or maybe the tooth fairy does exist. This is a fun and sweet distraction from the every day and that is why this is my pick of the week.

It was bound to happen sooner or later. That balance of nerd and metalhead would have to meet somewhere. And that somewhere is...Nintendo? Here's an 8 bit version of Slayer - Angel of Death. It's too enjoyable for words. Also be sure to check out the 8bitsbrother's channel on YouTube. You'll also find yourself strangely fascinated.

It looks like everyone's gotten the word and have moved to Facebook. Even the dim witted, poorly educated, masses that turned MySpace into a den of stupidity have made their way over. I try not to judge and I try not to lose faith in humanity, but Lamebook is one of those sites that make it very difficult to have a positive outlook on our upright fellow citizens. Lamebook allows users to submit their friend's poor grammar, lack of good common sense, or just good old fashioned trailer park trash behavior. The most ironic feature of all is that it's user submitted. So often times the poster is just as 'lame' as the postee. But it's one of those sites where you laugh and you feel that we're doomed all at the same time. Isn't that what the internet is all about?

I have a sweet pick this week. Cake Wrecks is a blog that displays some of the more delicious errors made in cake decoration. A lot of the cakes show common misspellings, while other's just show someone's poor taste...not in cakes, but in the theme or design. It's like icing on a cake! I could probably spend all day with the cake puns, but I'll spare you the tasty details. Please remember to save me a piece! (update of sorts) I forgot to give the nod to Jessi for reminding me about this blog!

I'm on a roll with my pics of the week. In these uncertain times, blah blah blah, sometimes we all need to laugh at something. What's better than a trip through nostalgia at some of the craziest family photos taken. This is why I prefer to avoid professional photographers. I've always feared that twenty years later, I'd live to regret those photographs. So my pick is a blog pick and it's called Awkward Family Photos . It's also fun to see the mullets, the acid wash, and other fun trends that dated our memories forever. I think it's also good evidence to show all that psychological damage done to us by our parents. I mean, how could they?

I haven't posted any web picks in a long time. This site got me out of retirement and fast! We all know how to use and use search engines every day. We all use wiki's almost every day. There are so many reference tools on the web, it's only getting harder and harder to learn the old fashioned way. We all remember books right? I royally stink at physics and advanced mathematics. Stephen Wolfram did not stink at physics or math. In fact he is world renown for his knowledge of physical science and math. He has made several valuable tools such as Mathematica , which is still very widely used today. Last week, he unveiled his latest creation with a lot of buzz and fanfare. Wolfram Alpha is a research tool. That's the best way that I can describe it. It's not necessarily a search engine, but it uses search to define a query and to provide facts. It's not a wiki, it just provides basic facts on a subject and that's it. A great example would be to go to the ...

Part 1 Twitter Peripherals I made a statement recently that I think Twitter is going to hit the mainstream really soon. Celebrities, athletes, and politicians are now using and finding the service to be very useful . That means that as people that are in demand embrace new media, it will trickle down to the rest of us. So as the rest of us come out of denial that this is a niche tool for geeks that like to hear themselves talk, I figured it was time to run a short series on some tools and tricks in Twitter and help get people acquainted with some of the lingo that's involved. This will be very basic, so I'm not going to talk over anyone's head, hopefully. First, I did a poll of current Twitter users to see how they send their messages or Tweets (isn't that adorable?). After a quick informal review, most people still use the web interface at Twitter . Then comes people who are using Adobe Air applications such as Twhirl and Tweetdeck. A couple nerds are using th...

I think I'm going to hire someone to come and hit me over the head whenever I fail to post at least once a week. Just when I start to get traffic on the site I fail to post for 2 weeks. That's just not acceptable. So once again, I'm going to resort to tackling two birds, with one stone: Bird Number One: What's up? Not much...there really hasn't been anything to post about as far as my life goes. I've just been working. Working the regular 9-5, working on getting the house cleaned and packed up, ready for the move. I'm hoping we can start closing next week on that house. Speaking for myself, I know I'm ready to have a house with a living room and privacy again. I know Janine is too. I know our roomates are ready for us to go too. I'm sure they'd like the space. Bird Number Two: My plug of the week. Be it far from me not to drum up attention to a site or service once a week at least, and I'll try better to stick to that great Lewis Show tra...

Just because I am a hoot, doesn't mean I cannot have something to accompany my unique sense of humor. So when reading my blog, remember to keep these sites bookmarked and ready to go. Rimshot Sad Trombone Because humor is my favorite instrument.

I always promise to plug more sites, but I never get around to doing so. To break out of another slump, I give you Dipity  . Dipity works as an online time line of events in your digital life. These days, a lot of our lives are on the web, and this service puts them all together. Anyone can use this. Most everyone at least has a blog. Uploading your blog to Dipity creates a time line of that blog. A lot of people save and upload their pictures to a service like Flickr. With Dipity, you add those pictures to your blog time line and now you can start to see where this is going. For those with Twitter or Friendfeed accounts can do the same and the end result once you get your services uploaded, is a pretty complete time line which over time will create a great piece of nostalgia of what looks less like your digital life and more like your life in general. So Dipity is highly recommended, I've even put my time line in the header of my blog.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo . You know me, I'm a geek. I'm easily fascinated and amused by the neat and new things I can find on the web. So it's really hard to just completely blow me away. I've just seen it all before. I've seen and heard about a lot of innovation and it's always nice, but nothing ever really grabs my attention enough to blog about it anymore. Enter Ubiquity . First I have to say this is only available from the dev team at Mozilla, so you're going to need to have Firefox installed and running as your browser of choice (since I know most of you already have, you're halfway there). Ubiquity is an add on that enables you to use shortcuts and features that are already given to us by the web to mash together and make things more accessible, easier to share, and most important more fun to do. The video is worth the time invested to watch it, I highly recommend people check this out. I mean a program that can ma...

I figure if I have nothing to say, then I'll keep plugging sites. I love twistori . It was developed by Amy Hoy and Thomas Fuchs and it has a pretty simple premise. It takes a search feature from Summize to pull in six popular verbs associated with feelings and scrolls them in a story like format. People don't typically pour out their rawest emotions on something like Twitter, but by capturing terms such as Love and Hate, you can often times capture someone's true feelings about life, their friends, their job, technology..almost anything. So if you have a few minutes, it's worth checking out. Sometimes you can see both the best and the worst of humanity in the simplest of emotions.

The writer's cramp is still killing me here! I wanted to at least plug one of the most important band in our times, Nine Inch Nails. Trent Reznor has always been a pioneer not only in the style of music he brings to mainstream, but he's also a pioneer in this new computer age. He has offered his last two albums for free on his site for download. He just asks that people come out to see his shows. Some would question where the success is in plugging a concert tour, but NIN takes things up a notch by posting rehearsal footage in lieu of their tour starting this month. The footage has created quite the buzz and I recommend people visiting the site and watching those videos for yourself. There's lots of extras there too, such as a news feed..yes a news feed! RSS! It's all right there too, I just love visiting the site to see what's new, so I figured I would plug it to all of you as well. Go enjoy the site, go enjoy the music that they share with you for free, but ...

The desktop application environment took a big step forward with the recent release of Adobe's Air application. Adobe Air enables desktop applications to deliver web content for everything from live stock tickers to eBay. For the sake of this post, however, I'm just going to post about AIR apps and social networking. There are a few handy apps out there available for those who have taken the plunge into the world of Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc. Here's a short list of apps that I have used, what I find useful and what I find lacking. Alert thingy is an application that connects users to Friendfeed, but it can also be used for Twitter, Flickr, etc. Pros: Allows me to Tweet, post to Flickr, shorten a URL with tinyurl, and provides an easy interface for Friendfeed.Drag and drop images easily. Cons: Interface seems lacking. It does what it's supposed to do, but something about the app seems, plain. The Pownce application is a simple to use extension of their network. Pros...

In relation to my new shiny mobile device, I wanted to plug some sites this week that helps me get those noisy social networks into one place. With the explosion of Twitter, Pownce, Facebook, and others, there has become an increasing need to pull everything into one place. I'm going to review and plug three services that help me do just that. Friendfeed was created by former Google employees who have a single desire to reign their feeds and turn it into one big feed. That feed can then create it's own social interaction with other Friendfeed users. This doesn't only benefit people that have accounts in multiple services, but it can work as a feed reader just by creating an "Imaginary Friend", and import your own feeds from friends, or from any other RSS feed to create something that gives Google Reader a run for its money. I'm partial to the feeds, the ability to reply to Twitter messages, and the flexibility to keep up with just the things that I want to k...

I have to make a plug for the guys at Animoto . This was a cool, quick way to take some pictures and make a quick video. I'll be using these guys again a lot. Here's a quick show of our beach visit this spring.