86 (and Counting) New Posts

Where’s the new stuff?

Good question.

Not that long ago, the experiments with app engine and blogger were incentive enough to test another platform.

The test turned into 86 posts.

Which is kind of like moving without leaving a forwarding address.

OK so the 86 (and counting) new bold lentil posts are here.

This is includes new stencils, cloud calculators and other good stuff.

Stencil of David Lesar

The CEO of Halliburton, David Lesar, has been based in Dubai for over a year. This move from Houston to Dubai was attributed to the need for Halliburton to grow its business in the “Eastern Hemisphere“. A couple years ago President George W. Bush in a state of the union stated that U.S. needs to “make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past. (Applause.)” Cherche le CEO.

Dali in Legos

Looking intense and featured elsewhere, the Salvador Dali in Legos is something to see. Such rectangular plastic brickness glaring in the California sun. In contrast to the flowing melting semi-corporeal forms in his paintings.

Using Baidu

As the leading Chinese search engine, Baidu, is used by over 5 million people and has over 57 services but with limited English content or support it is literally a world apart. The main page with its sparse minimalism is familiar enough, as is the single text field for a query. But overlaying a translation differences start to come out.

First up there is some English there on the main page, as a top level search choice no less. Specifically there is a tab for ‘MP3’. Which probably is less English than a technical shorthand for an audio encoding scheme. But it would be kind of funny if 20 years later long after the MP3 format is long forgotten if ‘MP3’ became a loan word for free digital music.

But it is weird. Consider if Google or Yahoo had a top level search tab for 搜索风云榜 right between news and shopping.

So fortunately if your Chinese is not very good you can of course make use of Google’s translation tools. Which is handy. So starting with news you can just click right here to see the current results for the news page on Baidu.

The results are the mostly familiar China news, international, financial, sports entertainment and such. But there is also a page for the Olympics (which could be handy) and the international news page has a military section. Whoa. There’s an addition to add to the Google News >World page. But then again why not.

The final tip is from the main page shown above is the 搜索风云榜 or ‘fengyun bang’ or baidu trends page. Top searches, top ten lists and yes a scrolling window of garbled stuff, like a query for ‘rogue eunuchs’. Whoa again. I think this posts is done.

WordPress Tags versus Blogger Labels

In the old news department, there are good online discussions that debate tags versus labels without seeming to get to the point about WordPress blog tags versus Blogger blog labels.

OK here goes – a WordPress tag is a user keyword that spans all the wordpress blogs but a blogger label is a user keyword for an individual blog.

Not that complicated.

So for bold lentil if you click on one of my WordPress posts, say Karl Attacks, with the tag ‘stencil’ you get this. Which is all the WordPress blog posts with the tag ‘stencil’.

On the other hand if you click on one of my Blogger posts, say Robin Gunningham stencil, with the label ‘stencil’ you get this. Which is all of Bold Lentil’s Blogger posts with the label ‘stencil’.

Pretty simple.

Now why cross-blog is another question but at a minimum it gives deeper appreciation to some differences between WordPress and Blogger.

FWIW the shortcut boldlentil.com is finally live.

Orange Furry Bike

They come in gray, black, bright magenta, lime green, charcoal and even orange with black stripes. Furry bikes are out there and with the internet, they are getting easier to catalog and compare. 

 

Six SWAT Guys Hanging Off a Helicopter

How to comment in BOLD

It’s pretty nifty how the default WordPress admin settings allow you to see the top incoming search terms. The top bold lentil terms are currently:  

banana sushi, homemade bottle opener, mccain stencil, holes, personalized styrofoam cups, use of parenthesis, oboe, numonic definition, frogs, john mccain stencil, self.response.out.write, gustave doré, chuck close, unlucky numbers, and so on.

Which is like whoa. How about that banana sushi post. But then further down the list I see lots of queries for “how to write bold comments” and “how to comment in bold letters” and such and because the blog is titled ‘bold lentil’ people click here.

Fine.

Let’s do something useful this time. Assuming the comment window you are typing into supports HTML then to comment in bold you will need to do the following:

1. start your comment, when you get the word you want in bold stop

2. type the begin bold tag: <b>

3. then type your words

4. the type the end bold tag: </b>

5. finish your comment.

So for example if you wanted to comment on this post: “Wow this is such a useful post.” and say you wanted to emphasize the word useful with some bold then you would type: “Wow this is such a <b>useful</b> post.” Which should look like this after it’s posted: “Wow this is such a useful post.” If doesn’t you can always move on to ranting about the sub-par blogging software.

Turrell’s Three Gems

It was cloudy so the hole was white not blue. There seemed to be an abundance of security cameras tucked into brownish plastic dimples looking down from above. The outer walls had small cracks various places that were distracting. Somebody had recently (hopefully only) spilled something on the floor. There are better descriptions elsewhere (and even some video) but the panoramas captured other aspects of the space. It was blinding even on a cloudy day.

Helen of California

Haig Patigian‘s 1927 sculpture Helen of California or the head of Helen Wills.