Thank you both for the insightful responses(I knew I came to the right place)!
Steven -- The original inspiration was a "State Machine" your code re- write was what I was trying to accomplish but quickly got in way over my head. Thank you for expanding on that aspect of it. That will give me some really good material to learn with. I wanted to be able to seamlessly add new new states like say "flash" without changing the code in many different places. I have great appreciation for OO design (respect those who can successfully implement it); I just find it has quite a learning curve. Gabriel -- Thanks for the encouragement; despite it's simplistic nature it took me a good bit of time to get working...I'm getting a little faster the more I code. I like the insight on the testing aspect of it. I found that I always try to test my code using "interactive testing" as you called it. This can lead me to getting bogged down in trying to "out smart" the user (who is only me anyway) and spend less time actually testing the code (this is probably a common problem). Never really thought about writing a test module just to see if the darn thing works! Oh and I know better on the syntax thing thanks for catching it and calling it out. Going to rework and go from there (I feel some new questions coming on...) Thanks again for the nudge in the right direction! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
