As far north as we are up here, we get a bit of extra darkness, not so bad as the arctic of course, but at the height of it, it gets light at around 8am and dark again at about 4:30pm. Our weather is relaitvely mild so its easy to forget that we are up as far as we are .... so anyway at this time of the year my commute is both ways in the dark. The first time I saw the DLG system I thought it was pretty cool - it does look as if it would solve the being fairly invisible from the side, no matter how many blinky lights you use problem, but its expensive and requires a fairly bulky battery (and I already have a big battery for my bright headlight...). I was thinking you might be able to do something similar with a string of led lights in a frosted tube, but wasn't sure how bright it would be. The firefly looks plenty bright and the water in the bottle probably diffuses it nicely, and if you don't like the color get a new bottle.