As part of the promotion for the movie, they hid 28 boxes in 28 cities where the movie was opening. I haven't seen many people talk about the box, so I thought I would do a quick post about the box I found.

The tweet for the Austin box looked like a toy store. I did some quick checking and discovered it was Toy Joy. I was able to use Google Street View to validate the picture. I couldn't pick up the box that day, so I assumed that someone else was going to get it.

The next day, my wife and I were out so I figured I would call and see if anyone had picked up the box. No one had, so I raced over and there it was, hidden under some stuff. The employees were glad someone came to get it, because they had no idea what it was. The box was wrapped in brown paper and had this cool artwork on it.

When I unwrapped the paper, inside was a box cover in pages from the book Blue Like Jazz.

Upon opening the box, I discovered it is was filled with a treasure trove of Blue Like Jazz stuff. It had a copy of the script, a CD with a few songs from the sound track, a bottle of AQUAlike, the fake water used in the movie, some prints of early artwork concepts, a production still, a note from Steve Taylor and an actual prop from the movie (the goggles and head lamp that the Pope wore). You can see all the pictures in this gallery.

I just wanted to say thanks to the Blue Like Jazz crew for putting together this incredible gift. I'll treasure it forever.

And if you haven't seen the movie, go see it! You can even bring a screening to your town.

Using that uploaded file, extra code was added to my functions.php file in my standard theme which opened a backdoor and gave free reign.

Many thanks to Alex McKee who helped me track things down.

I recommend reading this post from Dave Meehan for more detail.

FYI, a couple things that should have clued me in (which I'll look for in the future). First, I started getting an error on my admin console about extra data sent before the headers. I stupidly went into functions.php and fixed it (even working with 8Bit support) without noticing the added code. Second, in the source to my pages, there was a misspelled "Wordpres Counter." That should have clued me in as well.

Please make sure you use antivirus and your definition are current. If you do get a warning on any page, please let me know so I can investigate.

Thanks.

I wanted to add a brand new image, but I didn't want it to be visible on the page at all. So first I tried the obvious - use CSS to hide the image. The bookmarklet was too smart for me. If an image is hidden via CSS, it won't be found. Then I tried setting the height and width to 0 via CSS. This didn't work because the images were less than 80x80. The Pinterest bookmarklet honors the height and width specified via CSS.

In the end, I came up with a solution using opacity:

<img style="opacity: 0;position: absolute;top:0; left:0"
     src="image_for_pinterest.jpg">

Pinterest picks up this image and it does not display on the page or affect page layout.

This method can also be used if you want a specific image to be the first image Pinterest finds.

If you want to see this in action, check out the MLB.com Personas Interactive page.

The message this year was focused was on creating new habits. I called it "Helpful Habits for a Happy New Year."

The five areas I picked were:

• Physical Habits
• Intellectual Habits
• Financial Habits
• Emotional Habits
• Spiritual Habits

I would encourage you in this New Year, pick a couple of those areas and come up with new habits that you are going to start. And habits you are going to stop.Then write it down! Keep yourself accountable. And make this a great new year.

If you'd like to give it a listen, it's here.

It occurred to me that the government has TONS of stuff that they could probably sell to get us out of debt. Why is the government holding on to tons of crap when they could just sell it?

When families need to get out of debt. They sell stuff. They have garage sales or sell stuff on craigslist and eBay. So why can't the government?

So here are some ideas:

• The Smithsonian has millions of artifacts that aren't even on display. Sell them!
• Instead of putting all the Space Shuttles in museums, take one apart. Sell the tiles. People would pay thousands of dollars for Space Shuttle souvenirs.
• Clean out all the old junk at NASA and sell it.
• Does the Library of Congress really need all those books? Sell some.

Wouldn't it be great on the next Independence Day for the government to be financially independent?

Can you think of any other junk the government has that it could sell?

You can click the image for a PDF if you want to print it.

The impetus of this decision was my preparation for the message I delivered at church today, Don't Second Guess Your Life. Feel free to give it a listen. Here's the summary:

• Don’t spend too much time looking back
• Don’t worry about what other people will think
• Don’t be afraid to make a mid-course correction
• Don’t underestimate the impact of one person
• Don’t overestimate the effect of one decision
• Don’t keep making the same mistakes
• Don’t just make good decisions, make wise decisions

Also, in case it hasn't been clear, we moved the family back to Texas. There's more information about that in the message.

We're glad to be home.

When it comes to things like unrest in Egypt or tsunamis in Japan immediacy is incredibly important. We want to know what's happening and we want to know it now. And reach means that everyone in the world gets to hear and see what's going on.

But when it comes to our personal lives, maybe immediacy and reach isn't all it's cracked up to be.

All of us have moments where we have the impulse to say something that probably isn't the wisest decision. With the advent of the internet, blogging and social media, we are all given a platform from which to say these things. Immediacy means that we can say things quickly (usually without much thinking) and reach means that everyone can see it (whether we want them to or not). People have created entire sites based on this concept like Failbook. When you combine the immediacy and reach with the permanence of the internet, you have a recipe for failure. For that you have to look no further than FAILBlog.

My personality is such that when I have an opinion, I want to tell everyone. That's not necessarily a good thing. Besides my post this week, I've posted some pretty inflammatory things that I've regretted later. One of my goals this year was to be more less negative, and having a platform where I can easily post my negative opinions simply doesn't work for me. It's too easy. I know you're thinking I should just have some self-control, but it's not just about that.

I don't want the platform. And I want back the time that I waste interacting with platform.

So I'm swearing off social media for a while.

Not only am I stopping this blog, but I'm going to stop subscribing to blogs. The only blog I'll continue reading is planet Mozilla because it's job related.

I've unfollowed everyone on Twitter. I'll no longer be posting to Twitter. I tried to remove all my tweets, but Twitter doesn't make that easy.

I've removed all of my content from Facebook. I haven't unfriended everyone because I wasn't sure if I wanted to go that far. I'll probably just use the option that turns off all comments.

I'm leaving LinkedIn alone primarily because I don't interact with it and it has potential employment implications.

Note I'm not going to actually remove these accounts because I want to keep the names just in case I use them in the future, and also they are used for authentication.

So basically I'm going off the social media grid for a while. If you need to get a hold of me just send me an email. Anything at kaply.com will get to me.

This post will self destruct on midnight on April 15.

In addition, this past year has been a pretty rough one for our family, so looking forward we decided that we needed to make a major change. So we've decided…

…to move to Nashville, Tennessee!

There are some job possibilities there that I'm investigating.

We'll be officially leaving Austin at the end of the month.