It's here! AGAIN!

Tomorrow is the Fourth of July!

You know what that means? Tomorrow I will be eating too much, possibly drinking too much, and blowing up too much stuff. None of those silly little fountains, sparklers, snakes, or other little cardboard things – just the BIG stuff – the mortars that shoot up and look all awesome. It's almost like a professional fireworks show… except for the delays between reloading, the food and bathroom breaks, etc. Good times. Good times!

I just hope the Poblocki Sign Company forbids their genius workers from doing anything other than watching fireworks. I don't think they'd have the common sense to look where the launch tube was aiming before launching a multi-colored explosive into a neighbor's house.

Today, in the UW-Whitewater parking lot, some clowns employed by Poblocki Sign Company (they have nice company t-shirts and trucks!) managed to cover my car, and the row of cars next to me with fine metal shavings.

I guess it's too much work, or would require too much thought to hang a tarp or something to block any debris resulting from taking a circular saw to a metal sign.

I guess I can't expect too much though… the State of Wisconsin is in a heavy budget crisis, which means they need to cut costs and hire sub-par companies to complete some tasks. Poblocki must have been the ideal match when they were looking to do some sign work.

Did I mention that I'm not a big fan of the metal shavings that the Poblocki Sign Co. got all over my car? Grrr…

McD!

Do you realize that by introducing a 1/3lb Angus burger, and offering it with cheese and bacon… that I'm going to have to try it?

I try really hard not to eat at McDonald's, and that works out pretty well… but when I do go, I normally end up getting a double quarter-pounder. That's a half pound (pre-cooked weight) of meat. With the fries and drink, that's a bit much. The single quarter-pounder, on the other hand, isn't quite enough. (This is reading like I'm a 300lb person. I'm 6'2" and 165lbs..) So this magical 1/3lb burger is like the MAGICAL in-between burger!

mmmmmmm

It's too bad The Ninja can't recommend food.

The wait is over!

You can now get book, movie, game and music recommendations from a REAL pretend Ninja Bear. THE Ninja.

Ninja Picks has "officially" been live for about 5 minutes now. It's pretty exciting.

Important updates will be posted here, more minor things will be sent out through twitter. (You can follow ninjapicks on twitter by clicking here)

It was a VAST undertaking, requiring a few HOURS of programming, and TENS of minutes of image editing… but NinjaPicks.com is almost live.

There's a bunch more tweaking, and design/layout work to do – but I envision that all being finished tomorrow… which means it'll probably be finished by Friday.

What is "Ninja Picks"? Ninja Picks is a website (that we'll pretend is) powered by a REAL LIVE…stuffed teddy bear in a ninja costume. After you provide The Ninja with the title of a book, movie, game, or name of a song or bad, this incredibly powerful ninja will battle the evils of the web (mostly pirates) and return with a list of things that you might like!

Fix it!
Come on!
Do it!

The Lexar JumpDrive Firefly is the best designed flash drive I've come across yet.
Below is an amazon link, you can click through to see a larger picture of the drive -

So, what makes this guy so great? First, its small and convenient size – about half the length of some flash drives. And second, the location of the key-ring clip makes sense!

More times than I'd like to think about, I've seen an entire set of keys hanging from a computer because someone has their flash drive on their key-chain. Every other flash drive I've seen puts the key-ring hole on the drive itself, even if the drive has a cap. If you look at the picture of the Lexar drive, you'll notice the hole on the left side, in the clear plastic cover. This allows someone to keep their drive on them at all times, and when they want to use it, they just pull it out of the cap and just plug it in. The cap stays attached to the key-chain, rather than the drive!

Why is this brilliance so uncommon? Especially when the alternative just seems so stupid?