Happy 6th Annual Day of the Ninja, everyone!

So, you want to start your own sandwich shop? Well, you've certainly come to the right place. Maybe. I don't know. You're the one thinking "Oh, hey, I want to know how to start a sandwich shop! This place titled 'The Sandwich Shop Ninja' might be a good place to look! Surely this is the best and most relevant source of information," not me.

Anyways, this is the best and most relevant source of information on starting a sandwich shop. The best one in the world. There are many things you will want to think about as you design and start up your very own sandwich shop. Some things are important to think about, some crucial, some vital, and some will leave you bleeding in a dark alley in Chicago if you don't think as carefully as necessary so you'd better think very, very, very, very carefully about everything here. You don't like bleeding, do you? Exactly.

Location

The first thing to do is rent, buy, or get a lease on a location. Location is everything, except for the things that it is not. There are good locations, and then there are bad locations. Here are a few examples of good and bad locations:

• The corner of two busy streets - Good location. Busy streets mean many customers.

• The mall's food court - Good location. Malls are always full of potential customers. Even during a zombie apocalypse, be it the survivors hiding in the mall, or the zombies that come in when some fool thinks its safe to go outside. Zombies love sandwiches. Brain sandwiches.

• The bad part of town - Good location. Thugs, gangsters, mafia hit-men, mimes, and other various no-good-doers all love sandwiches.

• The moon - good location. It is a known fact that astronauts enjoy eating delicious sandwiches.

• Just Down the Street and Around the Corner - the ultimate location. Anyone can find this place from anywhere. If someone gives you the greatest sandwich of your life and you ask him where he got it, odd are he will say "just down the street and around the corner." You will follow his directions, and you will find it. Every single time.

Employees

After you have chosen a location, you will need to hire employees.

Most restaurants will do good to hire a ninja, and only one ninja. Although it would seem otherwise, efficiency and productivity decrease as the number of ninjas are severely decreased due to what is known as the Exponential Ninja Factor (ENF). If you manage to perpetuate a rivalry between the two, you may be able to avoid any ENF impacts; however, unless both ninjas are evenly equipped and skilled, you run risks of loosing an employee. Contracts with ninjas must be considered carefully. A ninja will hold his or her end of the contract with the utmost honor, even to the extent of loss of life. In fact, it is unknown if any ninja has ever survived a breach of contract. It is also important to take note that the same holds true for employers of ninjas: statistics show that out of all employers who had failed to hold their end of a contract with a ninja, 100% had met an untimely demise.
While one ninja can handle most of the workload, you will still need additional employees. Once you have hired a ninja, you will need to acquire a Ninja Ally Compatibility Table. Certain types of employees can cause disastrous results when mixed with ninjas. The NACT tends to vary between ninja clans and families, though there are a few incompatible types that are common between all. Namely: dark wizards, zombies, Michael Dudikoff, and pirates. They all mix badly with ninjas, but pirates most of all. Your sandwich shop will have a severe impact on the neighborhood's levels of swashbuckling and scurvy epidemics.

After procuring your NACT, there are a few area-specific positions you will want to have filled. Most cases deal with areas that contain larger demographics of unruly people. If you are located in one of these areas (ie: "Bad Part of Town" location), you may want to hire a polar bouncer. Nobody messes with a bouncer who is also a polar bear.

The Other Stuff

Then after you do some other stuff and get customers and all, you reap the rewards of capitalism. Congratulations, you have successfully gone from "sticking it to the man" to "the man it is being stuck to." Don't ask what "it" is. You don't want to know. Or maybe you should, since you'd have already stuck some of it.

Recap

In conclusion, the steps to sandwich shop success are:

1. Choose a location

2. Hire a ninja

3. ???

4. Profit

Thank you for reading, and join us later on for "Extra-Extra-Extra-Extra-Large Tee Shirts" and "Endangered Species: The Oboe Cat."

There's been a huge lapse in updates lately. Most of that is due to finding out how much time 15 credit-hours take up (18 credits if you count the artistic anatomy class that I'm 'auditing' so that I don't have to do the homework). I think the amount of time I spend on campus during the week is more than what I actually spend awake in my apartment. I realize now that 1 credit-hour is the equivalent of about 3 real-time hours. I don't remember it being this bad last semester, though. Maybe the more credit hours you take, the longer they are in real-time?

I hope to see more free time when I finish up a project next week with an independent game developer, though most of that time will probably go to studying for classes. I'd be sure to at least have something up for December 5th, the International Day of the Ninja.

I've reconsidered the current need for large file uploads. I'll figure that out after the rest of the site is working off the new website system I'm programming. For now I'll just be using a workaround for uploading the occasional file larger than 8 megabytes.

This is a time-lapse video of part of my trip from California to Utah, compiled from 2036 pictures from a digital camera mounted on the passenger-side sun visor of my car. It isn't the entire trip, since my camera's batteries kept dieing and the camera's power jack input doesn't seem to work at all. Batteries are a pain to change when the battery compartment is covered by one of the zip ties holding the camera in place.

The next time I try this I will be mounting my tripod to a part of the car and sticking the camera on that. I don't know why I didn't think of it the first time through. Also, I'll need more batteries.

I've moved back to Utah and school has started up again. The apartment's internet has started working, which is good. Aside from school, I've been working on a freelancing project, so I won't have much to post for a few weeks. I have a few things, but I made a few major changes to my website's coding and I have yet to find what sorts of bugs that has sprung up. I've already fixed enough so that all the old stuff still works, it's just adding new content like this post that will be affected by the changes.

This is a 1-hour speed paint done in Photoshop inspired by Steven Reineke's "Pilatus: Mountain of Dragons." I don't have as much experience using Photoshop as I'd like to have.

Here is a time-lapse video of the image being created.

Some of the better drawings from my sketchbook from last month. Most are from a weekly drawing session in Sacramento that I have been going to.

This was from a project at the web design firm I was working at. This was one of the rejected designs, as it was "too cartoony." The client eventually went with a crappy logo with stock photos slapped in. Apparently that was what they had wanted, even though they had specifically asked for something "cartoony."

So it's been two months since the last update. The background for section 9 is almost done, though that project has been put on hold due to actual paying jobs. Along with two freelance jobs I picked up, I also got a job at a local web design firm that had recently incorporated. That lasted for three weeks. Then I got laid off. I won't go into detail about it, but I imagine there's at least one Dilbert strip that applies for what happened.

As for the other two projects, one will be completed hopefully sometime in August. The other is a shorter, more local project in which I have to get dome by the end of next week.

The next update will hopefully be not too long after the end of next week after I finish the smaller project and update my portfolio.

So school is out for me, I'm back in California, and I'm looking for a job. I finally got access to the CD's I needed to fix my computer and upgrade back to Windows XP, so things should be running efficiently again. We might finally start seeing updates on the progress meter for the next Sandwich Shop Ninja episode in a week or two.

No interesting search queries for this month, unfortunately. Just the same old stuff from the last few months. Its kinda funny how many people end up here looking for sandwich shops, though.