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  • #followfriday Twitter list
    Mar‣20‣09

    I’ve been using Twitter for almost 2 years now. I can’t even believe that. Like most new Twitter users, I’m sure, I felt like Twitter was the silliest thing ever. Now, all this time later I’ve found Twitter to be an incredible asset and a nice replacement for the office environment I left to go freelance. I feel the network that I’ve become a part of keeps me sane in that I can get all the nerdy design and internet banter out and participate with people instead of  boring my poor wife with all of it. Through Twitter I’ve met many interesting people and have made some great friends and connections. Here, in no particular order, are some of the people in my network I’m proud to follow and I think you should follow too.

    @benrasmusen

    Ben Rasmusen is one of my best friends and is the guy who got me into Twitter. He is a most excellent code ninja and shares some great stuff.

    @rogieking

    Rogie King is an awesome designer and was an inspiration to me to get my site into gear and level up my CSS skills.

    @mattbrett

    Matt Brett is another designer who has been a constant source of inspiration to me.

    @MadGringoCEO

    This guy is a mad genius. He writes all the copy for MadGringo and he pimps Hawaiian Shirts all day. How awesome is that? He has been very supportive of my freelance switch and my silly little side project and is also a great role model for the proper attitude in the workplace.

    @Vonster

    Von Glitschka is one of my illustration idols. His work is amazing and he offers amazing tutorials and lessons on drawing vectors through his site IllustrationClass.com.

    @lemieuxster

    I’ve become good friends with David Lemieux through Twitter and several projects we’ve collaborated on. He makes all kinds of awesome stuff.

    That’s all for now. Please follow these peeps if you’re not already, you won’t regret it.

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  • benlew.com v2.1 is official
    Mar‣20‣09

    Welcome to the brand-spanking new benlew.com. This site is the convergance of my personal blog (n0s0ap.com) and my professional portfolio. Here you will find samples of my work as well as my musings as a roving web designer and crazed geek.

    This version of the site has been a long time coming and I am proud to show it to you. There are a number of solutions and plugins I found along the way and I’ll be blogging about them in the coming weeks. WordPress is just such a powerful and flexible tool, I’ve been geeking out about it alot lately. I can’t wait to share some of the stuff I’ve found.

    Some of the blog archives are pretty old and have lived through several blog permutations so please bear with me if there are broken links or images. And I know there are some things to be polished and tested so if you see anything that you don’t like let me know and I’ll get right on it.

    Thanks for stopping by! I hope you have a great Hawaiian Shirt Friday!

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  • on the origin of n0s0ap
    Mar‣19‣09

    I get a lot of questions about the meaning of my user name “n0s0ap” and the zero symbol(ø) I use. Well, I thought I’d set the record straight.

    n0s0ap means nothing. Literally it means “nothing”. I’ll explain.

    It started back when I was in community college studying “multimedia.” I would see stickers all over the place drawn by various artists with a graffitiesque feel to them. They all had sweet “tags” and I was like “I want to make cool art and have a cool tag.”

    So I was thinking about what my sweet tag would be while I sat down to watch All Through the Night, an incredible Humphrey Bogart movie in which he basically spoofs himself and the movies he’s known for. In the movie Bogie’s character sets off to get revenge when someone kills the baker of his favorite cheesecake. Yeah, he’s motivated by cheesecake. It turns out to be some dirty nazis that did it and it all ends in blazing pistols and good old American mobsters taking out the crazy misled Germans. Anyway, all through the movie Bogie’s men say “no soap” a lot. They go to check the warehouse for thugs, none there, “no soap boss”. I heard it so many times in this movie that I latched onto it. Switch the o’s to zeros to add a little 1337 flare and I’m all set.

    Now, I operated under this tag for a bit and started to create accounts online using it as a username and I discovered something. “n0s0ap” is a pretty unique term and by golly, I was the only one using it. To this day I am still attached to every Google search result for “n0s0ap.” I really dig that so I latched on.

    But wait, I’ve got more. After getting questioned several times I thought I’d dig deeper. The term “no soap” actually started with No Soap Radio. “No soap radio” is a traditional punchline for a practical joke originating in the 1940′s. From Wikipedia:

    The punch line is known for its use as a basic sociological and psychological experiment, specifically relating to mob mentality and the pressure to conform. The basic setup is similar to the Asch conformity experiments, in which people’s proclivity to agree with a group despite their own judgments is tested.

    So basically a group of people would get together and say “let’s play a prank on Bill”. So they get together with Bill and say some stupid joke, typically “Two polar bears are sitting in a bathtub. The first one says, ‘Pass the soap’. The second one says…’No soap radio!’” and the whole group busts up laughing, much to the befuddlement of Bill who doesn’t get the joke at all and wonders if he should laugh anyway.

    So there is the origin origin, “no soap” is a meaningless punchline to a practical joke.

    I couldn’t stop there, I had to have more meaning if I was going to make it my identity. So I continued searching. I found it while I was reading Monkey: A Journey to the West, one of many translations and re-tellings of a Chinese legend. In the beginning of the story Monkey is struggling to learn new skills and become more than a monkey. At one point his teacher asks him to do an insurmountable task. “Sounds difficult” Monkey said. The teacher replied:

    Nothing in this world is difficult, but thinking makes it seem so. Where there is true will, there is always a way.

    This rang true with me and has become my philosophy in work and in life. Many obstacles we encounter are the results of over-thinking and self-defeat. If we truly try and go at hurdles as if we can jump them, we can soar high above them. So I apply this philosophy to my little term “n0s0ap”.

    n0s0ap = “Nothing is difficult.”

    The end.

    If you’re all the way down here reading, I’m amazed. Thanks for listening to my story. I award you +4,000 points of Awesome.

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  • Man, this blog sure is old, it’s time for a new one.
    Dec‣2‣08

    Well, I sure suck at blogging. But I will be getting into it more in the next year as my career path takes a huge and long-awaited turn for the better. More details of the future will come, hopefully with a brand new website. For now please check out my professional portfolio at benlew.com and hit me up on twitter @n0s0ap.

    Also take a look at some of my recent projects:

    hsfriday.com
    blueswarm.com (I am a bit removed from this one at the moment but my homies are rocking it)
    recipesnap.com

    Much more to come!

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  • Nerdy Things I Can’t Live Without #2: Quicksilver
    Jan‣25‣08

    Quicksilver

    This plugin for Mac changed my life and continues to do so to this day.  As it says on the website “at first glance, Quicksilver is a launcher.”  It allows you to find an application quickly and launch it.  This is the most basic use for it.  It is handy because now I don’t need to have 30 icons on my doc.  Instead I press option+tab, type the first 2-3 letters of the application I want to launch and hit enter.  It’s that simple and takes about a second.  But it’s not a hard coded launcher, it actually indexes your system and searches it.  So say I need to capture some audio to make a new ringtone for myself.  I do this rarely so the apps I use for that are hardly ever used.  I remember the one I use has “audio” in the name somewhere so I type “audio” and it returns a list of the apps containing that text.  Usually exactly what I need is right there ready to launch but in the worst case, couple down arrows and I’m there.  No digging around in finder to find the app.  And it goes further than that, it is not limited to applications it can index your entire system.  So you can find files and folders fast, faster than spotlight in my opinion.

    Now the app launching capapbility is alone enough to make this a powerful app.  What’s even better is the plugin’s capability to interact with other applications.  You can do just about anything you can imagine.  You can control iTunes from anywhere with a few shortcuts.  You can send quick IM’s.  You can add things to your GTD app.  You can even set a timer or do calculations with it.  It’s mindblowing the versatility you have with just one shortcut.  I am still an amateur at this, I don’t use it even close to its full potential.  Try it out, you’ll like it.

     Bonus NTICLW: YubNub.org

     YubNub is a quicksearch utility for the web.  It’s just like google but with the addition of search commands.  So say I want to look up snails on wikipedia.  I type in “wp snails” and it goes straight to wikipedia’s page on snails.  There is a command for just about any site you can think of.  The site allows users to create their own so there are about a million to just from.  The ones I use most often are: yt = YouTube , imdb = imdb.com, a = Amazon.  Now the reason why this is a bonus on this post is its amazing interaction with Quicksilver.  Normally I would have to go to my browser, go to YubNub and then search.  But with a QS plugin I can access this from anywhere.  I pull of QS type “yub” and then I can enter my search.  Its so amazing! I’ve already won a few office trivia challenges with this.

     I cannot do either of these utilities justice.  Please visit their sites and try them out.

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