(source: hindustantimes)

The entire electric motor is about 500 nanometers across, 300 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair.

This kind of stuff I find very fascinating, how about you? 

“The real breakthrough came a couple of years ago, when we discovered a method for peeling shells off multiwalled nanotubes and grabbing the core with a homemade nano-manipulator operating inside a transmission electron microscope (TEM),” Zettl said.

Now just try and say what that scientist is quoted as saying 10 times really fast. Hmm

AIM (also AOL, Trillian) users, I’ve added a button so you can be notified by IM whenever this blog updates, which regularly is a few times a day, but today is of course twice hourly. This free service is vcalled blog change bot Coolio. I’m checking it out myself. The link is along the lefthand column beneath my geourl.

Still in the nachos mode. Hey, I love to eat, what can I say. That love for food, coupled with my online programming work, has resulted in me gaining some pounds. I just added my webcam to the blogathon site (hot cams), but am not sure if they will get it approved or not though as it says “take up to 24 hours” to get listed. Maybe if one of the blogathon admins surf by, they’ll hook me up.

While eating I took some time to check out crushing krisis and see what tunes Peter and friends have released so far today. He is putting out a new song at the top of each hour throughout the blogathon and he is going to be on my live radio show at 4am PST / 7am EST (the final two hours of this Blogathon). Nice cover of The Beatles from him there.

Here’s the original Blogthon 2003 song (mp3 stream) that I wrote. I know, my singing ain’t all that good. Maybe somebody with real singing talent can rework it. Comments?

Kara cooked me up some nachos, so I got sidetracked from finishing off this webcam. Man, am I ever going to making this game? (yes, I will). I did get the image to show up on the main page (look to the right). I’ll setup a special page that refreshes and link to it.

Meanwhile, a stranger IM’d me out of the blue and is having one of those bizarre IM conversations where they don’t answer any questions you ask them. Talk about a sidetrack! LOL

6 hours into the Blogathon 2003 and I’m finally getting my webcam page setup (next entry I should have the coveted links! Wow, where is the time going?!)I noticed that my server time (which is CST) is about 10 minutes behind the actual time. My webcam pictures will show the correct time. I grabbed my handy linux reference book and looked up the date command for the server and ssh’d into my box to make the change.

Just type the following to change to 2pm:

date -s ‘ 1400′

BTW the way this timer keeps going off and it puts the pressure on ya to keep posting! I was reading another blogger say that man 30 minutes go by fast, and this is true, so I have to keep this one kind of short.

(story: Zinio Offers BusinessWeek Trial Issues) A great idea for innovative company Zinio, who is pushing forward the process of digital magazine reading. There is something sacred about reading a magazine in print form. I currently read PC Magazine in digital format and have been doing so for 2+ months now. There are pros and cons to digitial magazines.

Pro: search through magazines using a search engine
Con:  you can’t carry them around quite as portably as you can a magazine; you can’t fold them. Taking your laptop into the bathroom isn’t well … portable.

Pro: it looks cool and makes you feel very geeky — and even has the page turning digitally! Yes, those annoying inserts exist.
Con: it is a bit slower to read through the magazine as you can skim and read faster than you can digitally move through what fits onto the screen (well if you have my eyes, anyway).

Speaking of Wayport, they are offering connectivity in airports around the US. You need to get to the airport early anyway, so this is a handy way to get there and stay net connected while you wait to board the plane It’s available in Seattle (well, since I’m here, I’m excited anyway).

Looking for freeware webcam software? Try Webattack. For commercial software, I like webcam32. I’ve been a registered user of that for ages.

I have my webcam running and FTPing on a 30 second refresh, so now I just need to cook up a quick Javascript or meta refresh page to contain it — or pull it into an iframe. I’m also going to include a smaller updated picture on the main page. Should be more on that soon. In the meantime, here is my ugly mug via the Aiptek camera … what do you think? (throw peanuts, if you must). I know, I know, I’ll change the shirt in a little bit. No Miami Vice jokes.

… more of the 500+ Blogathon 2003 bloggers and what they are up to. These again, from the webring

8Bit Joystick breaks down the gaming scene, does a little manual RSS aggregating, and talks tablet PC (I still have that on my wish list)

A radio stream (techno) by bluecalx with live commentary. Just heard something about whether Tina should send Keith pictures of her underwear. Hmm.

50 %

There’s a 50 % chance that I’ll survive the ‘thon.
Will you survive the Blogathon?
I think there is a 99.9% chance I’ll survive the way that I feel (not tired at all) right now anyway, but this is less than 25% of the way into the Blogathon.

<a href=”http://brian.peace.us/weblog/”>Brian</a> is going to be blogging from his cellphone random ravings

<a href=”">gooberbug</a> has a live ferret cam going and the charity is … save the ferrets (ferret rescue)!

<a href=”http://www.wannabegirl.org/”>wannabegirl</a> is explaining, in detail, how to get into blogging. Well done.

Where many Hollywood and major publishing houses have sold their souls for also rans and “sure bets” it is refreshing to see that creativity is still alive and kicking on the web. I just spent some time touring other Blogathon 2003 bloggers and here’s what I have come across so far:

twodolla.org is posting pictures of toilets with commentary.

podview is giving musical horoscopes and it says Libra should be singing today, so perhaps I should upload my Blogathon 2003 song? If anybody really wants to hear it (I played it yesterday at the beginning of the radio show) then click on comments and say something and I’ll upload the mp3.

A graffit-type montage courtesy of all that jazz

Only 3, but I’ll be reporting on more. I sure hope to get started on that game before lunch time! Oh, and the webcam is plugged in, now I just have to set it up to FTP and we’ll be cooking with gas, but I’m in the blog search mode ATM. I’ll get to it.

Well here we are at entry #8 already and there will be a total of 48 required Blogathon entries over the 24 hour period when it is all said and done. It is possible that I’ll have more than 48 weblog entries of course, but that is the Blogathon 2003 structure: one blog post every 30 minutes for 24 hours. If you’d like to sponsor me, you can still do so by visiting and clicking this link — Break those piggy banks, because you can donate as little as $1 Everybody has some spare change laying around, so why not donate it to a good cause? Adult Sites Against Child Porn (ASACP) is who I’m blogging for, and we all need to do something about protecting the children in the world. The children shape the future.

Be back in 30 … and really, hopefully, with some more news on this live webcam (now that I’m nourished).