I have the light sense connected so it does go onto the lights on setting when i turn on the head lights it would just be nice to be able to reach it quckly for tweaking.

The problem is that he turns his headlights on before sunset, thus he wanted an easier way to get to the dimmer settings.

Another way that could work is a time based dimmer program. I'm sure something like this could be hacked in from the kernel or userland, and set up to set the dimmer at 80% at 6:00, then %50 or whatever at 7:00 pm. If someone was really creative, they could allow a list of sunrise/sunset times to be entered, and base it off that

If only I could program at the level needed to do this...