As everyone is likely aware, I am no longer a single man…

I want to introduce my wonderful wife, Hayley! We’ve been caught up in a wedding tour (details of which will likely be blogged, I’m sure), and some general “getting used to married life” stuff. It’s been a busy couple of months since the wedding, but we’re starting to finally feel settled in. It’s good to have a companion.

I’ve imported most of the blog posts from the wedding website, so you may want to filter through the archives of the last 8 months to see what’s there. Hayley wrote at least half of those posts, which will give some of you a better introduction to how awesome she is.

I’ve also added some Facebook “like” buttons… USE THEM!

sudo useFacebookButton -reader

We hope to do this blogging thing more often. We’re going to still be busy with life, but nowhere near as busy as we’ve been. Expect updates about cycling (we’re buying bikes in the next 2-3 months), rock climbing (apparently I did pretty OK on my first trip), vacation planning, and teaching primary (that’s right, we teach the Sunbeams!). Oh, and maybe I’ll tell you all about how magical Mass Effect 2 was… If you’re lucky!

By the way, if we’re missing you in the Blogroll, let us know!

Well, I’ve been asked by quite a few people for details on the engagement (SURPRISE!), and I think writing a blog post about it is probably the most appropriate way to spread the word (since I don’t have everyone’s email address).  I feel bad enough that most people learned about this on Facebook…

First off, Hayley and I have been dating since her first weekend in Houston.  I met her at Institute on a Thursday night (plug for Institute!) and thought, “Wow, she’s pretty great!  Easy to talk to, easy on the eyes…  That’s a good start, right?”  I failed to get her number (because I’m lame) that night, but the next day I looked her up on Facebook and sent a quick message asking if she wanted to attend a friend’s graduation party (Alina is now Dr. Alina) and meet some other wardies.  Hayley accepted and found my whit somewhat fun, so she shared her number and we made plans.  Well, things were going too well, so I decided to be bold and expand the plans by inviting her to dinner before the party.  Needless to say, things went so well she broke up with her boyfriend back in Utah!  (Kidding – that was already happening, but it’s funny to me that there was a mini-overlap of maybe 48 hours from our first date to her actually finishing the breakup.)

Since that fateful eve, Hales and I have had a blast getting to know one another, going on trips to Austin, Utah, Dallas, The Happiest Place on Earth (Disneyland – shame on you if you didn’t know this), and throwing birthday parties for one another.  She has very naturally become my best friend, and I can honestly say that she makes me a better man through encouragement and the occasional chastisement.

So – the engagement!

We’ve been talking about getting married for a little while, so it was something we both knew would happen.  In fact, I picked out the diamond and ring about 3-4 weeks before actually proposing, then just waited for the jeweler to get everything squared away.  By the beginning of October I had a small box burning a hole in my pocket (figuratively – don’t worry about the pants in my room with the burn marks, that’s from something else) and wanted to just make it official.

Well, on October 15th I made plans w/ my friends Jason and Erin (and their baby girl) to double by getting some dinner and then heading to Miller Outdoor Theatrefor a recreation of the Pink Floyd album “Dark Side of the Moon”.  After picking up some food we headed to the park, got situated on some blankets, and began eating.  After a little while, Jason’s little one (she’s about 18 or so months old) was getting fidgety, so I told her to come grab some toys out of my camera bag.  She started digging through and found Gumby (thanks Gumby!), a slinky, and then this funny little mystery box.  When she lifted the box out I told her, “Uh oh!  That one is for Hayley! Do you want to go give it to her?”  She looked around, turned towards Hayley, and dropped the box at her feet.  (Yes, this was all kind of according to plan, though how much can you count on the acting abilities of an 18 mo/old?)  Hayley looked confused, Erin ended her phone call realizing what was happening, Jason smirked, Aliya ignored me, and I leaned over to whisper things in Hayley’s ear which left her blushing and excited.  I pulled out the ring, got a kiss, and then Erin caught this face with my camera:

Part of why this was fun for me was because I’ve been teasing Hayley that I would propose to her in front of a giant crowd, which I successfully accomplished since we were near the front of the lawn with a couple thousand people behind us.  They may not have known what was going on, but that’s probably for the best so Hayley wasn’t so embarrassed.  There was, however, a pet duck with the folks next to us that gave a celebratory *quack*.  (Yes, I may have imagined the *quack*, but the duck really was real and on a leash…)

We got a few more pictures of Hayley being excited and surprised (I had to apologize to her since she didn’t feel like she looked all that cute, but I always think she’s crazy when she says that).  Below is a decent shot of the ring – it’s the Tiffany Engagement ring (yellow gold band w/ a white gold crown).  The rock isn’t huge, but boy howdy does that thing sparkle!  (Note: SUCCESS!  Trust me gents, if you’re looking for rings, sparkle > size…  Multiple reasons: 1) carat size is biggest price booster.  2) lots of sparkle makes it look bigger anyway.  3) it’s honestly more noticeable.  4) non-sparkly huge rocks look like cz.)

After that, a few phone calls were made and I got a chance to play w/ my favorite neice.  She looooves the iPhone!

And yes, in case you were wondering, I was very happy.  It was kind of an odd moment…  You prep for that kind of thing for a long while and then it’s over… Done.  And then everything gets sappy and you have to just sit there and smile.  Haha!  Actually, it was a nice weight lifted off my shoulders – I was (and still am) a happy man.

This is either the official call to the ‘rents, or she might actually be talking with my Mom.  I let her do most of the announcing.

And as a thank you to my little helper, I made sure the youngin’ got a chance to call some people herself.  She used up the rest of my battery making phone calls, but since she helped me present the ring, I guess it’s only fair..  (BTW, isn’t she funny? She grabbed my phone, saw Hayley talking on hers, and decided to play along.  According to Erin this little lady loves her phones and Jason is going to struggle once she’s a teenager!)

As for plans going forward, we’re tentatively (95%) shooting for March 26th as the wedding date here in Houston, TX at the LDS Temple.  We’ll have a ring ceremony and a celebratory reception in the late afternoon/evening.  For all the Utahns out there, we’ll also be doing a reception near Ogden (possibly at Weber State’s Alumni center) a couple of weeks later.  For the Chicago folk, we will be doing an Open House at my parent’s place possibly the week after that (none of this is set in stone, btw).  The reason for an Open House instead of a Chicago reception is simply that I don’t know that many folks back home any longer – so many of you have moved across the country!!

So that’s my story!  We will have further adventures to share, I’m sure of it..  Just stick around and we’ll keep you posted!  There may even be a new blog a brewin’ that will chronicle all our happenings, with two authors (which hopefully means more posts)!

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…

So, I wrote this up in an email for Jason and I realized that I might as well post it since I had typed it up anyway…

I’ve been playing with stuff the last week to get all of my good software and such installed on the Mac, and here’s the list of what I would call essential:

• NewsFire – best RSS reader in life… SO GOOD! It’s really simple and it makes life pretty easy for me since it’s not integrated and messy like some other RSS readers. I should have gone with something like this a while ago.
• Transmission – super simple and nice BitTorrent client. Azureus had me messing with settings for at least 30 minutes to get all the encryption and everything I wanted setup, this came with the best setting pre-done and without all the stupid bloated code in the program. Simple and clean!
• Adium – THE best chat client I’ve ever used – ever! The only thing it lacks is video chat capability, which I can load iChat up for on the random occasions when I want to do that. Seriously though, it incorporates every other chat protocol I have ever heard of with the exception of Skype, which I hate anyway. I need to figure out some of the plug-ins and such (haven’t messed with it yet), but it’s great already… AND they’ll be adding Facebook Chat support in the next release (doesn’t quite work in the beta), which I think is hilarious and cool.
• Camino – kills Firefox in almost all respects other than themes and add-ons (which I really didn’t use other than IE tab, which doesn’t matter on a mac) – I do have firefox for a couple random BYU sites that don’t render in Camino (which makes NO sense but I just didn’t bother uninstalling firefox before I went with Camino, so I just use it since it’s there). Anyway, I really like it for it’s clean look and OS X keychain support.
• AppDelete – Most effective uninstall prog I’ve seen. I know you just need to delete the executable, but this deletes any random settings or libraries that install with your install prog. I was suprised when I used it the first time to see what I was missing in my normal uninstalls. (There is a $5 donation required after you use it a certain number of times – but it’s definitely worth the $5)
• Caffeine – makes me happy because I can avoid my computer going to sleep when it should be downloading. Plus, it runs on the tray (top of the screen) and makes turning it on and off pretty easy.
• Cyberduck – I like it for ftp, cause it’s pretty simple and easy to use… You may have another preference, but it makes me happy that it is simple.
• Handbrake – great for ripping movies to the iPod, PSP, or other things. Pretty fast actually!
• Jomic – BEST comic reader other than CDisplay, but CDisplay is windows only (sadness of my life, trust me).
• Alarm Clock 2 – I have my computer in my room (I’m at college and can’t do much else since everyone else will complain I’m taking over the living area), and I thought having an alarm clock that would bring my computer out of sleep and play some wake up music would be GREAT – thus Alarm Clock 2.
• VLC – goes without saying, but it’s a million times better than Quicktime. Besides, I swore off Quicktime in the 90′s, and I don’t wanna disappoint myself at this age.

Anyway, there are a ton of others that are “required” such as VMWare Fusion and a Boot Camp partition of Windows, but those should go without saying. Let me know if you’ve got something else I should try!

OK, OK… I admit, I gave into the Facebook stuff a couple of years ago and I initially felt very silly for doing so. Having said that, I now look at what the Facebook team has done with great awe… Honestly, they’ve put some amazingly cool technology onto a single website that will now let me share everything I want (while keeping everything I want private safely hidden) with my friends.I have to come forward and express my absolute hatred for myspace.com. I did have a myspace profile for a while, though I never posted anything besides my name and the school I attend… Before myspace was purchased for a bajillion dollars, I fully intended on becoming rich just so I could buy the site and shut down the servers. The reason I hate myspace so much is because it seems incredibly amateur. I also became increasingly concerned with the safety of the thing… The last thing the world needs is another avenue for people to be creepy with, right? There have been plenty of reports of sexual predators stalking young/teenage kids who are spending massive amounts of time on myspace, and that’s really sad and a problem that the myspace people should be taking a little more seriously; I don’t want my little sister in the middle of sexual predator’s battlefield. There seems to be little to no content moderation, and I don’t agree with that. I learned from a successful social networking professional that it’s a million times better to moderate content and ban those who abuse their membership, thus keeping the other billion people who responsibly use your product happy. Every time you allow one person to post inappropriate or disturbing content you lose five people who were more responsible.Anyway, I hate myspace.

Facebook has done things a little differently. First of all, the website looks classy! There is a lot to be said about the quality of the Facebook product; each page looks professional, there is a very consistent feel to each page, there is content moderation to make sure I don’t stumble upon inappropriate content, and I have very powerful control over my privacy options. I know myspace provides some of these things, but it doesn’t make the process of manipulating options very easy, nor does it look professional.

Groups are a fabulous way to link people together. Picture albums are a much better way of presenting your images in an easy to view manner (whether to your friends, everyone, or only a select few). Each user can select the political campaign issues they consider important, thus indirectly encouraging more and more people to vote. Companies can advertise in new and non-invasive ways through Facebook marketing (whether using the small banner ads – which I find very unobtrusive – or through groups). The new “share” technology is really interesting, bringing the non-Facebook world INTO the Facebook realm (I’ve shared one of my favorite websites – www.pandora.com – with my friends).

What I really enjoy is how the Facebook team is stepping outside of the box and changing many of the stereotypes of how the internet, and social networking sites, should work. They have done some really cool things with the new technologies and programming languages available to present a really fun and useful place for you to begin your daily web surfing experience.

Am I alone? What do you think about what the Facebook team has done?