I don’t take the tollway much any more. I don’t like the idea of spening 25¢ for the privildege of doing 35MPH in stop and go traffic. Call me cheap. So I take surface streets to and from work most of the time and that means I have too much time to think.

As I move from stop light to stop light I began to imagine a ribbon traveling above the road. The ribon is red, green and yellow. It represents the next light. If I am traveling under the green portion of the ribbon, when I get to the next light I will go through on the green. If I’m under the yellow band, I’ll get there when the light is yellow. Under the red and I’ll be stopping.

Today it hit me that it would be kind of cool to have a display in your car that showed this. It could be tied in to GPS so it knows where you are and either get the traffic light pattern from the government or from other cars and then form estimates.

Why? Because you get folks who race from light to light weaving in and out of traffic only to get to the next next light when it turns red. They think they’re getting there faster but all the rushing only gets them ahead by about a light. So imagine one of those Speed Racer types getting a clear indication that they’re racing to a red light. The indicator on their dashboard fads from green to red as they race ahead. Suddendly they throttle back to just below the speed limit and the indicator fads back to green.

Where you’d get people racing ahead would be at the back end of the pack. But they probably wouldn’t go racing through the entire pack, once they got the green indicator they’d want to cruise in the “green zone”.

Better option: I’ve started taking the train on non-school days. This gives me an extra 2 hours of reading time each week. The train ride is 1/2 hour each way. I take it twice a week. During the break I’ll probably take it every day. With gas prices where they are the cost is pretty much the same. But I like makeing up some time during the week. Instead of sitting in traffice listening to NPR, I can sit on a train and read. I’m cutting back on traffic on the roads, saving gas and producing just a little bit less pollution.

A rather distinguished looking young man walked up to Carteé and I at lunch this afternoon and introduced himself. It was none other than David Wright. We had a great chat with him and I hope that he joins us more often.

It is really cool meeting the folks who write the blogs I read. They’re real people, not just computer screens. :)

I have to say that I really love WordPress! Everything about it has be excellent. I just finished importing not only the content from the blog on the .Mac account, but I was even able to pull in the content from Blogger.com! All of my blogging now resides in one database. This is excellent.

I still need to edit the data from both accounts (around 450 posts) but the data is here. I can now safely delete the Blogger blog and allow the .Mac to expire without losing a thing. Now I just wish I had written something worth keeping! :)

Oh yes, and this is still not the final version of the blog. I thought the other theme was a bit too effeminate. This on is boring but it is a bit more manly.

Joe Thorn has a great post on being a conscientious objector to the cultural war. I agree with all he says there and wish I had written something like it. I could add a few more items to it but instead, I’ll just paraphrase Hebrews, “But as it is, we desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called our God, for he has prepared for us a city.”

Now we live with tent pegs. We’re Americans or British or Canadians or whatever, but our citizenship is in heaven. We’re ambassadors here, not residents.

This doesn’t result in our apathy towards the world, listen to the news and hear how the big responders to Katrina is not the government or the Red Cross, it is America’s churches.

Welcome to By Farther Steps 3.0. I’m still moving in and unboxing things. The posts from By Farther Steps 2.0 are in a box around here somewhere. When I find them, I’ll unpack them.

I also plan on doing some painting and cleaning up.