This is my life

Thank you! That was totally my understanding as well (the quoting-other-people-meaning-punctuation-is-outside-the-quotes thing), but I didn't want to say for sure because i wasn't confident.

I read the difference between those two sentences similarly to you, but in American English, the only "correct" way would be to have the exclamation point inside the quotes. That said, because I understand the difference, I have actually used the UK/NZ version before, even though it'd be wrong by American English rules. (I do that a fair amount, I find, if something makes sense to me - e.g. not necessarily using the direct address comma if it screws up the way the statement sounds when I'm reading it).