Thanks for the compliment!
Here is what I found while shooting the fireworks:
1) Turn off the auto focus. otherwise, the camera goes hunting for stuff in the dark and you will miss the shot. I manally focused on the first bursts of fireworks, and then just left it there for the duration of the show.
2) I swapped between 4-5 second exposures, and 10 second exposures. I got lots of nice shots with 5 second exposures as well.
3) Most of my shots were taken at ISO 400. ISO 200 didn't work well for some reason.
4) A tripod is an absolute necessity (kinda obvious, but maybe that will help somebody) 
5) I used mirror lockup with the self timer. This gave me a 2 second delay, meaning, pressing the shutter locks up the mirror, and the exposure starts 2 seconds later.
This was to reduce any camera shake since I don't have a remote shutter release.
I missed a lot of fireworks due to the guesswork of the 2 second delay, but I actually got more than I missed, so it wasn't a bad tradeoff.
Then people tell me that I got a nice picture cause I have a fancy camera.

Sure. My circular saw builds nice furniture as well b/c it's also fancy. 
If anybody else has firework photo advice, please post it so I can try any improved techniques as July 4th draws closer.
Thanks!