Especially When They're Green

I have a question for you to pick your brain on:

What is the main goal for traffic lights?

Sounds like a stupid question, right? But as this random pondering fluttered across my idle brain this morning -- while I was waiting at a red light, no less -- I started to realize the possible breadth of answers.

Are traffic lights for ...
- actually controlling traffic (go/stop)?
- providing order to traffic?
- getting commuters to their destinations most efficiently?
- giving pedestrians a chance to cross?
- providing an emergency override avenue?

The main gist is, what is the primary goal that traffic lights strive for? For instance, if we didn't have the stoplights, we'd still have rules (and possibly adjusted rules) to compensate for the kind of chaos one gets when a traffic light suddenly stops working -- that's not the scenario I mean.

Rather, what if traffic lights didn't exist at all, and traffic bylaws accommodated for that lacking instead? Are there any goals/functions of the traffic lights that wouldn't be made up for? Is there something particularly special about traffic lights that can't be replaced?

Wedding Photos Everywhere

If you didn't already know, we're having major issues with our photographer and the fact that he lost key parts of our wedding photos to a corrupted memory card. Basically, we lost pictures of:

- ceremony (vows, exchanging rings, kiss, and the recessional)
- group photos @ staircase
- photos @ church across the street
- group photos in front of hotel (both families)
- photos in garden area behind church

This has been amplified by him formatting and reusing the card (probably out of inexperience with how to deal with data loss), so of those lost photos, he was able to recover only 35. To add pressure to the situation, Jiro remained rather silent and somewhat uncooperative in the aftermath, and didn't even bother to offer some token refund or discount!

Yeah.
Don't even get me started.
I'm livid enough already.

He's come back with justifications and a "let's focus on the positive" which is all fine and dandy, but the long and short of it is that we are missing photographic memory chunks out of important parts of the day from him.

And now, everywhere I look -- photography blogs, photo frame sample images, posters on the street -- I see wedding photos. And they only serve as a stinging reminder of what I don't have from my own day.

At least I got the girl.

Male Pattern

Everyone loses hair.

Men lose hair, and the follicles in very visible parts of their head just give up and quit, leading to male pattern baldness and sometimes slightly affected self-esteem.

Women lose hair, but most of the time, they grow back. And then that lost hair ends up all over the apartment, where it seeds dust bunnies and constantly sticks underfoot. Worse yet, flaunts its existence to the men who have male pattern baldness.

Sometimes, life is unfair that way.

Still Here

I'm still around.
Many things happened.
Update you later.