I was sitting, near sunset, on the outside dining deck of a too-expensive restaurant in Key West, enjoying a too-expensive seafood dinner (wine helps a lot with this) and watching the marina that the restaurant overlooked, when a cigarette boat came in, making a production of it. Apparently this was not just any cigarette “type” boat- the crew had t-shirts and such with “TEAM CIGARETTE” prominent, they were very disciplined, and handled the boat with extreme and obvious care, at the same time giving those of us in the restaurant quite a show. <br><br> In the process of shutting her down for the night they popped the engine hatch revealing impressive (if unidentifiable) large chromed shapes. Cute- at first I thought the engine hatch was damped, like the cassette door on a stereo deck, but it closed the same way, from the dashboard. Then they ran through a series of system checks. One of these system checks was somewhat surprising- the operator did something on the dash, and a tall, thin wand, something like a retractable radio antenna but much longer, telescoped up out of the forward deck. When it was fully extended, a very bright pinpoint source of white light at the tip started methodically flashing an SOS. They let this run a few cycles then retracted the gizmo. Cute.<br><br>Anyway, this came to mind in playing with the new Photon 3 LED micro-lights. The second “button” on the light has seven programmable modes, which amount to dimmer and flasher settings, and one useful power-saving setting, all “microprocessor controlled”. <br><br>I’d gleefully trade at least 5 of those programmable modes for an SOS. <br><br>Given that there’s a “chip” of some sort in the device already, that shouldn’t be a huge deal. Not that I don’t know how to flash an SOS manually, mind you- but if you do it for 5 minutes, by the clock, you’ll understand what a chore it would be to keep it up for hours. Being able to set one of these and walk away from it would be worth a lot.<br><br><br>