James,

I guess we kinda hijacked your thread... but I want to conclude my participation in the topic by saying once again that I think your idea is excellent and I appreciate the fact that you took time to present it so clearly to the forum!

And just so you know, I will be trying your idea.

As an aside: you can see from the ideas in this thread that this is a fairly common problem for which there aren't a lot of commercial solutions available. You might want to consider selling your picks on ebay