The Usual Susspects

Imagine if the fictionally warped world of M.C. Escher was taken off the flat easel that makes his illusions possible, and thrust into the real 3D world? Now throw in some busy city sidewalks and a bucket of street chalk and you’ve got the work of a European artist named Julian Beever. Beever creates chalk drawings on flat city sidewalks that amazingly appear three-dimensional when viewed from just the right angle. From any other angle the drawings look totally distorted. Above you see an amazing illusion of Beever acting as if he’s ready to dive into the drawing, which is really a totally flat section of sidewalk! On the right is another of his drawings where he is being rescued by Batman and Robin from a subterranean Gotham City. Below are two links with photos to many more of Beever’s 3D illusions. Enjoy

I’m sorry to say that Patty’s grandfather, James Fox, passed away last night. Rest in peace.

Yes, another post about how great Google is, but I’ll keep it short. I’ve always had Google as my homepage and several months ago I started customizing my personalized homepage with a few available Google gadgets. Last week Google introduced the feature of multiple tabs to their personalized homepage. Now to be perfectly honest, my Yahoo has had this feature for years so Google is actually behind the times on this one. But the great new feature Google included was the ability to add content from  any  RSS or Atom feed to my pages. Now I’ve set up a second tab and put all the blogs and newsfeeds I like to check on one page. So whether it’s a friend's personal blog, the official Google Blog, or breaking news from WSOC-TV (obligatory company plug), I can now see when any of them have a new post all at a single glance. P.S. If you want to add my blog’s feed to your personalized Google homepage, the feed url is http://www.mikesussman.com/blog/atom.xml.

I’ve been waiting for 18 years to hear those words! Tonight the New York Mets clinched their first National League East divisional title since 1988. Plus as a bonus, the Atlanta Braves streak of 14 consecutive NL East titles has ended.

I know I’m behind the times but I just stumbled upon this video posted on somebody’s blog. Apparently it’s been popular around the internet for the past six weeks. Very impressive and original choreography. Given the poor production quality of this video I originally thought this was just some stupid human trick, but this is a real music video by a band I’ve never heard of called OK Go . Well their idea to spread their music through an interesting viral video worked on me because other than the fact that I enjoyed the video, I also like the music and I may see what else they’ve got. This video also reminds me of another viral video I like which featured “dancing”:  Where The Hell Is Matt .

  If “Touch My Building” didn’t make you curious, alternative titles for this post were “The Fish Smells Fine” and “The Ghost of the 7th Street Station”. In Charlotte there is an interactive work of art that lights up and plays music when you touch it. This enormous artwork is nine-stories tall and stretches a full city block. And oh yeah, it’s a parking garage. Although it’s all one and the same (a ying and yang thing) the building is known as the 7th Street Station and the artwork is titled  Touch My Building , created in 1998 by artist Christopher Janney. The interactive part of this building is 36 thirty-foot tall “light fins” located around the structure with touch sensitive pads at the base of each one. When you touch a pad, it and the fin light up and plays one of a wide variety of notes or sounds. Plus the parking garage also doubles as a clock, as every hour all of the fins play a synchronized melody for serveral minutes. Very cool. By now you may have noticed that I’...

The NFL season kicked off last night and the Panthers’ first home game is this Sunday. After a few years working as the backup, this will be my first full season on the sidelines.

For those who are not internet savvy, no, I did not spell the word delicious wrong.   del.icio.us   is an extremely popular social bookmarking website . Like other social-networking trends that are popular among teenagers (like myspace.com), I just didn’t care about it at all. However I found an awesome blogging trick   that allows me to organize my posts by categories (also known as tags). Since I use Firefox   and I already installed an extension called Greasemonkey , all I needed was the third ingredient of a del.icio.us account to add categories to my blog. What’s great about categories/tags is that it allows you to easily find related posts that may interest you but which aren’t listed anymore because they’re older. At the bottom of this post you’ll see that I added the category tags of “blogging”, “Internet”, and “Webmaster” to this post. Clicking on any of these links will send you to a page which lists every other related post with similar category tags. Plus...