Well let’s see, I paddled a boat, deflated a few beach balls, and ate a ton of food. That is the recap of last night’s Winter Beach Bash sponsored by Malibu in Scottsdale.It was a crazy party for a couple reasons. First off, there was no cover charge which vary rarely happens here in Phoenix, especially Scottsdale. And second, drinks were complimentary. Yeah that’s right, all you can drink and eat until midnight.

They had like 100 bottles of Malibu to use for the night and I probably drank 3 of them.They had a few different drinks to choose from. As you can see in this picture, I crossed off the different ones I tried and put how many I had next to the name. My drink of choice was the Malibu Mango probably because it was basically Malibu and a few crushed up leaves off some tree. The second best was the Mojito Coco-Libre which was a fancy way of saying Malibu and Coke.

There were Tiki bars and surfboards everywhere and the place reminded me of Hawaii. The only thing that was missing was the beach. The live music was awesome and the rapper was pretty good considering we had never heard of him. He had the crowd rocking all night.

Once the party was shut down, we headed over to the after party at 6 Lounge. Of course, I took a plate of chicken from the party as we were leaving to eat along the way since it was a hike of like 3 blocks. 6 Lounge was the busiest I have ever seen it. It was tough to even get in but we managed to squeeze are way in.

And thats it, I basically stopped thinking at this point and vaguely remember a cab ride and a lean pocket once I got home. And what felt like 10 minutes later, my alarm clock went off because I had to get up to go to work this morning.

The price you pay for partying on a weekday…

Happy Leap day everyone. Today is February 29th, the day we only get every four years. So what am I doing with my extra day? Working

I have never really looked into Leap Day so I thought I would do a little research (aka googling) to see what I could dig up about this day. To my surprise I found some interesting facts about Leap Day.

So what exactly is Leap Day?

Wikipedia had a great statement that detailed Leap Day as the following:

“Although the modern calendar counts a year as 365 days, a complete revolution around the sun takes approximately 365 days and 6 hours. Every four years, an extra twenty-four hours have accumulated, so one extra day is added to that calendar to keep the count coordinated with the sun’s apparent position.”

So basically are calender is screwed. And to fix it, we just need to throw an extra day in there every four years and everything is fine and dandy. I love it.

It is not officially considered a national holiday, which is why we all have to go to work and school. However, I did find an interesting article at ThisLondon.com (full article) that said “companies in London are being urged to give staff the day off on February 29 - to help the environment.” It really is a good idea to try and make Leap Day a “green” holiday to encourage people to help the environment. The sad fact remains, one day off from work is not really going to change much for the environment. In fact, if everyone had off in the United States today, people would probably drive more. To the malls, movie theaters, beaches, you name it.

What really caught my attention in the article though, is where it mentioned that “the extra leap year day, traditionally when women can propose to men, could help to tackle climate change.” I read the part about women proposing to men and thought, not once have I ever heard of this. So once again, I went back to my friend Google and had to look into this.

What did I find?

Sure enough, Leap Day is the one day where women are typically encouraged to propose to men. Wikipedia had a paragraph that really goes into details about this:

“There is a tradition that women may make a proposal of marriage to men only in leap years, further restricted in some cases to only February 29. There is a tradition that in 1288 the Scottish parliament under Queen Margaret legislated that any woman could propose in Leap Year; few parliament records of that time exist, and none concern February 29.[1] Another component of this tradition was that if the man rejects the proposal, he should soften the blow by providing a kiss, one pound currency, and a pair of gloves (some later sources say a silk gown). There were similar notions in France and Switzerland.”

So apparently in some countries, women can propose to men throughout the entire Leap Year, while others only allow it on Leap Day itself.

So I must say to the women of the world, please do not propose to me today. I really don’t want to spend my whole weekend trying to find a pound of gold, a silk skirt and some gloves…

Happy Leap Day!

Last night, I managed to stay up very late and incorporate a huge new addition for Life of Justin. That would be the new Photo’s Page, which can also be accessed via the Photos button above.

The one thing I was struggling to do with this website was incorporate photos. I have thousands of pictures and it becomes very hard to share them with anyone. I have had a Pro Flickr account for a year now and I try to upload my favorite pictures there whenever I get a chance. I really like Flickr because it gives you a lot of options to organize, tag, and share photos. It also allows you to upload very large pictures which not all sites allow.

The problem I have been having lately, is that to share my Flickr photos I had to put links in my posts to Flickr to see my pictures. I hated this because when you run a website, the one thing you try to do is keep the reader on your page instead of sending them to an external one such as Flickr. I was also not liking the way Wordpress inserts photos into your blog posts.

Luckily, I managed to stumble upon the Flickr Photo Album for Wordpress plug-in. This handy little tool did a lot more than I thought it would. It displayed my albums, created thumbnails, a tag cloud, and even pulls up the titles of the images from Flickr. This sure beats trying to create my own photo album and uploading all my photos to my FTP server.

So here is the breakdown on what I went through to get the Flickr Photo Album plug-in up and running:

Install

The install was straight forward just like any other Wordpress plug-in. Simply upload the folder to the plug-in’s directory on your FTP server and then activate it via the Plug-in’s tab. There is a link on the plug-ins page that that says configure and this takes you to the photo albums setup page. You can also get there via the options tab in the Wordpress admin panel.

Configuring

Configuring the plug-in is also very easy. The hardest part is getting your Flickr account setup to work with the plug-in. You need to request an API key from Flickr and then authorize the plug-in to have access to your account. The entire authorization process only took about 15 minutes to setup. The other thing that needs to be done is deciding the URL of your photo album. You can name it just about anything and I decided that /photos would be the best for my site. So my album can be linked to by going to www.lifeofjustin.com/photos.

Managing Photos

Once your account is configured, all of your collections and sets from Flickr will automatically show up. All you need to do from there is decide which ones to show and which ones to hide. It also allows you to order the albums which decided which albums will show up at the top and vice versa. Now, the only thing left to do is view your photo album page and see if all of your pictures are displaying correctly. It looks very cool because each album shows the title with a few thumbnails below it. (Hint, you can change the number of albums to display by editing the HTML files that came with the plug-in). The Flickr Photo Album for Wordpress plug-in also lists all of the tags from your Flickr photos as well as a view slide show button. This is a very handy tool because it launches a photo viewer in a new windows that displays your photos.

A Few Tweaks

Of course, with any plug-in there are always a few small glitches that need to be fixed. The first problem I ran into was the pictures were to wide for the main content area of my blog. By default, the plug-in displays the medium sized picture of Flickr which is around 500 pixels wide. I managed to edit my style.css file and made my main content area wide enough to display the photos. I originally edited the HTML file to display “Small” images but they were to small and I could hardly see them.

Another problem I have yet to fix is the ShareThis button at the bottom of individual pictures. For some reason, when you click it and fill in the ShareThis information, it always sends the link to one of my old posts. It does not contain the link to the photo itself which is kind of weird. I am still looking to fix this so if anyone has any suggestions, please comment on this post.

Today a new feature was added to LifeofJustin.com that will make it easier for readers to share my posts with others. When I was using Blogger, I had a Digg button on my right sidebar that allowed people to Digg my site but this did not allow people to share certain posts.

Now that I am using Wordpress, tons of plug-ins are available to make things work much better, and more importantly, easier. The name of the plug-in I am using is called ShareThis and it is available for free.

You can visit the creators website at ShareThis.com.

Basically, this tool allows me to add the button you see at the bottom of this post to every post I make. Notice when you click on it, a small box opens up listing all of the different social bookmarking sites that I added. Some of the social bookmarking sites included include Facebook, MySpace, Digg, and Del.icio.us. Not only does it allow social bookmarking, but it also has a tab titled “Send.” This lets you send any of my posts to a friend via email, myspace, and even SMS.

The ShareThis plugin also allows tracking via their website. This means you can log into their site and see stats based on your website. It allows you to see how many people have been sharing your articles with others.

I really have high hopes for this plug-in and hope to see everyone start using it. It is a great way to help build more traffic using the best source; Social Bookmarking.

Over the weekend, a few breakthroughs occurred. One of them involves a big Road Trip.

We went out partying again Friday and Saturday night and it is starting to get old. I think drinking is going to start fading back out for awhile. Not only is it expensive, but it really does not help you much in the long run.

The major decision that was made this weekend was that Roadtripperz.com is finally becoming a reality. We had the idea of going on a massive Road Trip around the world and blogging about it back in college. We had everything setup and we were about to set out on the journey, but then decided to move to Hawaii.

So come this June, maybe sooner, we are going to finally blow the lid off this thing and see what happens. I am quitting my day job, and selling a bunch of the stuff I have in my apartment. Talk about a crazy idea huh? The goal is to travel as many places as we can and meet people from around the world. We’re going to document the whole thing in our blog at Roadtripperz.com. The website is not yet up but will be shortly. The site is actually underway but the hosting account has not taken affect yet.

We are also going to create a YouTube channel and upload videos along the way. There are so many places that I want to see such as Australia, England, New Zealand, and tons more. I plan to fly home to Wisconsin for a few weeks in June before I take off.

How are we going to pay for this road trip? Ideally the income we make off of all of our websites would help make this road trip possible. If we have to hitchhike around the world than so be it. We also plan on doing clinical research studies around the world. It is a great place to make decent money, meet new people, and help save lives by testing new medications.

So sit back and watch this thing unfold. The worst case scenario is I have one heck of a road trip story to tell the kids someday. And a website to prove it…