Thought Box

I just turned a year older, and hopefully wiser too, on July 6th…  I had a really fun and noteworthy adventure all day, so I’ll share a bit.

8:30am -wake up and harass Crystal for taking so long to wake up. (btw, my friend Crystal Gerber, from BYU, came out to celebrate and visit!)

9:15am -harass Crystal for STILL not waking up

9:45am -harass Crystal about getting off the couch, getting her swimsuit and such on, and getting in the car

10:00am - leave for Galveston Island! FYI – the drive is longer than I remember… Not a problem normally, but Crystal was STILL sleepy…

11:05am -realize I need money to park at the beach… Or at least that is what the high school age’d youngin’ told me when I got there. I asked if there was a birthday discount and he looked at me like I was speaking french… So, we went to Walgreens and bought suntan lotion (which I didn’t use) and lemonade and got $10 in cash back at the register.

11:15am - park at the beach! Note: swimming at said beach is fun, but realize you will end up a mile down the beach since the current runs diagonally rather than the way you’d expect.

12:30pm -Crystal says, “Ewww!!! I’ve got crabs!”

1:00pm -leave the beach and drive to Saltgrass Steakhouse on Seawall Blvd (still in Galveston). I got the half-rack of ribs off of the lunch menu and just about died… If you haven’t had the ribs at Saltgrass, do yourself a favor!

1:45pm -leave Galveston Island. This is when I realized that I was super sun burned… Actually, I realized when I got inside the 610 loop in Houston and noticed that my left arm was tingly. I was adding to my burn with some trucker tannage on the way home. ick

3:00pm -realize I don’t have a checkerboard cake pan set! Annie and Travis stole mine (though I guess I originally lent it to them for Travis’s birthday last year… Anyway, I love Williams & Sonoma because they had one for $25, thus saving the day.

4:00pm - go to Target to get supplies and argue with Crystal over a “It’s My Birthday” button that she insisted on buying and demanded that I wear the rest of the day.

6:00pm - leave for Buffalo Wild Wings and meet up with about 15+ of my awesome friends! I love BWW, and I was really happy to see everyone there to celebrate with me. I got to catch up with a few people I haven’t seen in a while, and I ate some of the most delicious food…

9:00pm - return to the house for cake & ice cream deliciousness! This is when everyone decided to embarrass me by going around and individually telling me why I am loved… It’s awesome in theory, and I certainly appreciated it, but holy cow was I embarrassed… Yikes!

10:00pm -did NOT get a kiss from Chera. I just want everyone to know – she’s been making a big deal about me “dreaming about a kiss” from her on my birthday, and I didn’t ask for one nor did she offer one. End of story.

11:30pm - got all kinds of phone calls from great friends in Utah, and made a couple call backs as well. I really do have a lot of quality friends in a lot of different places. I’ve seriously been blessed!

12:30am (the 7th) - End the night by watching The Fugitive w/ Crystal while we both fell asleep…

I really feel blessed to have such great friends and people who care about me. I didn’t include info about my family, but my parents and sisters were calling me all day long to share their love for me. I got one of the coolest gifts ever in the form of a Luau Murder Mystery Dinner set! I’m pretty excited to pull that one off someday! haha… Thanks again to everyone!

Here are some attached pictures of the festivities:

So, I’ve continued messing around with the blog because I love getting involved on mini-tech projects.  This time I installed about a dozen plugins and went to town making sure they work exactly how I want them to.  Most of them are “under the hood” type stuff, but there are a couple that you’ll notice and possibly take advantage of.

RosenBlog for Gamers
So, I don’t officially call my blog the RosenBlog, but I very well might in the near future…  The point, however, is that you can now view my blog in an optimized format on the Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, Playstation Portable (PSP), or the Apple iPhone.  Each browser displays a tiny bit differently, and now I’m set to optimize for each of those browser configurations.

(Sorry, I don’t have screenshots…)

Greet Box
The Greet Box is kind of fun and new. Depending on how you get to the blog, you may find a semi-personalized message for you as you access a specific post. For Example, when coming from a Facebook.com link you might see the following:

These messages are pretty discreet and are easily closeable.  I think it’s kind of a fun way to encourage spreading the word…  This also works for those who come in from Digg, Reddit, or all by themselves (displays a recommendation to add an RSS feed).  Nothing too huge, but kind of fun.

Sociable
Sociable is a simple sharing tool that gives a reader quick access to the correct link in order to share a specific post with the rest of the world. You should see the following buttons beneath every post if you visit the actual post page (not just the main page with multiple posts listed).

Facebook Connect
Now my readers can post comments with their Facebook ID which does a couple different things… One, it makes them a “user” more or less that can have their comments tracked on the site (I think – pretty sure). The other is that it allows users to post directly to their Facebook Feed that they have visited my site and commented on one of the posts.

You’ll notice below (if you’re on the single post page, not the main feed homepage) that you now see the Facebook Connect button:

(Note that I hate the way it is currently formatted and I will be modifying it as soon as I can find the right code… The padding and the text above the button are hidden away in some .php file within the plugin, and I’m not finding it.)

Once logged in, you’ll see this fun addition to the corner of your browser window:

Once you’re logged in and setup you just jump down to the comments box, input your text and it will post your information while your credentials come from Facebook.

You’ll have the standard Facebook stuff pop up and ask you a couple questions (like if you want to post a note in your profile feed or not) and then your comment will be up for moderation. Nothing super amazingly spectacular, but I’m all about providing options to people, and I think this one is kind of cool.

Statpress
Ok, so this one isn’t one that the rest of you can see, but I think it’s cool enough to share… I installed Statpress to do some simple analytics work for me. Nothing super spectacular (though I can install a couple other plugins that would work in coordination with this one to provide a LOT of info), but I think it is pretty cool to get some basic information from my users in terms of how they got to the blog and what they’re checking out. I don’t get tons of traffic, nor do I care all that much, but I like to feed my curiosity every once in a while.

(click on the image to embiggen and actually see the text)

That’s about it! Just thought I’d share some things. Nothing huge to update in the personal life other than that I’m enjoying the summer and my friends. Definitely looking forward to Travis and Annie visiting (likely) around Thanksgiving, and I’m pumped for Tony’s wedding in September. Also, I turn OLD on July 6th… Weird…

It’s no major secret that Fiddler on the Roof is probably my favorite musical…  I have been dying to see it in a professional show for years, trying to satiate my love for the story with the movie and semi-decent high school performances – but the wait is over!  Not only did I get to see the show performed by a professional company, but I got to see the greatest Tevye of all time – Topol!

When I first moved to Houston I took a look to see what shows would be coming through the area (not sure whether or not to trust the people who told me that the Theater District is one of the best) and I saw that this tour was coming through.  I pretty much Mountain Dew’d my pants on the spot and added 2 or 3 reminders to my calendar to check for tickets.  Eventually they come up on the ExxonMobil discount page (we get a small discount by purchasing group tickets) and I snapped up some good seats in the lower section towards the middle.  I got 4 tickets in my excitement!

My new best friend, Jenny, and I went with Matt Anderton and his wife (who was in the dark until we walked into the theatre and she finally saw a sign telling her what show we were there for – she was pretty euphoric).  Honestly, I had probably about 20 nerdgasms during the show as I tried to hold myself back from singing along and cheering during certain dance numbers.  Topol was everything I could have hoped to see in person – at the 74 years old he still has an incredibly powerful voice, a ton of character, and the energy to keep going!  Jenny and I noticed in the playbill that he has performed the role over 2,500 times throughout his career!  We may as well have been watching the real Tevye from the original short stories…

This was definitely one of the “Before You Die” goals that can now be crossed off.  I’m still smiling on a Monday morning back at work – and I hope the smile lasts for a looooooong time! :-D