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

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 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 ...

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.

While writing my earlier post, I realized that I need to start sharing some new tech ways to help me remember stuff. I claim to be a senile person and I have proven that I am over and over again. I can't think of any particular circumstances off the top of my head, because I've already forgotten them. Remember the Milk is an ideal service for people who, like me, are no longer capable to make mental notes and keep them. The best part of RTM, of course, is the ability to integrate technology in ways that post it notes can only dream. This site works like any other site on the surface like any basic calendar. I figured, I already have and use Google Calendar, why would I want to add this service. RTM's service page syncs with the Google Calendar. Not only that, it syncs with other calendars, email, has mobile options (which is the key), it works with Google gears (so it works offline), and best of all, I can have it Twitter to my cell reminders by sending it direct messages...

This week I'm not going to plug something entertaining, but something a little more necessary. A lot of us just don't have any memory any more, and I'm not referring to the kind of memory that involves remembering to bring home a gallon of milk, I'm talking about computer memory. Crucial has always been my site of choice for purchasing memory mostly because it's the easiest to use website that I think exists. From the home page, crucial can scan my computer to verify the model, amount of memory that I have, and can tell me manufacturer specs to make sure I buy the best memory. I also have a quick wizard to plug in information for my laptop because I am shopping for memory for the Dell, it's just too slow with 128mb of memory! Crucial is also great for purchasing Mac memory at a huge savings, it also gives the best prices for PC memory, flash cards, USB drives, and solid state hardware. So my pick of the week is a little bit of memory and a whole lot of upgradi...

We all remember the days of mix tapes. At least I'd like to think there aren't people walking this earth that never had a stack of cassette tapes that were made by mixing songs from other tapes or even the radio.... Now that I feel old, maybe I should make my plug for pick of the week. Muxtape is a simple service that allows users to upload twelve songs of their choice. You're able to order the songs as you like and remove the ones that you no longer want. Once that's completed, your Muxtape URL works just like a virtual mixtape, by streaming the audio back to the people you share the mixtape with. I had fun setting mine up, the only problem I've had is a weird inability to use this with Firefox. This does work great with Internet Explorer and Safari. I'm sure they'll get that fixed soon. No user in their right mind would use anything other than Firefox! Here is my Muxtape playlist . Check it out. I'm so proud of it! I want to know yours too, so leave m...

I've always been asked at work at my current job and my last job where I find good wallpapers. One has to be careful these days, most free wallpaper sites are run with malicious and intrusive ads, I shall call them ad ware. I have a couple sites that have ads, everyone needs ads to host this massive amount of bandwidth, but they are both non intrusive sites. The first one is one that I found on Digg a couple years ago, and I've always stuck with it. Interfacelift has always drawn my attention mostly because it's not full of wacky photoshopped super geeky and cartoony wallpapers. It's mostly just clean shots of nature and urban life. My favorite part about interfacelift is the variety of sizes for use, they even have HD which looks really good on any LCD monitor. They also have icons and themes for those of us who are tired of the default graphic user interface in Windows and OSX. The other one is new to me, it works almost like a social network, where the other one ...