Rich: I believe iRobot is a play on Asimov’s I, Robot, and not so much an iMac or iplanet thing. For what it is worth, I love my older roomba, and will probably be ordering a new one as soon as it is clear when they’ll ship.
Todd: you might want to take a look at xmlterm, which was a terminal in XUL that shipped in mozilla for a while; it had some fun toys like an ls that would show file icons.
My father is evacuating his house tonight because of Frances. My mom is on higher ground. My little brother and sister don’t remember Andrew– they were babies at the time. They are mostly bummed this weekend that I’m not coming, and celebrating a couple days off of school. It looks like they are going to get spared, mostly, but it is still a nervewracking time- they are old pros at this, and scoff at ‘mere’ category 1 or category 2 hurricanes, but Frances looks like a real whopper of a storm, the kind that makes long term Floridians nervous. We had it pretty good in Andrew, all things considered, but I did a lot of time afterwards in relief work, and the area around ground zero was… surreal. No trees over a few feet tall survived- they all got snapped off at about chest height. And entire neighborhoods just vanished. The first night, somehow we lost power but kept phone services, so we called my aunt,and she gave us the play-by-play over the phone. When she told us that the air force base had just been scoured from the face of the earth, we just couldn’t believe it- I mean, it was supposed to take nuclear strikes from Fidel, and the hurricane had just made it cease to exist. The government didn’t even bother to rebuild it. Anyway… I’m rambling, I guess, but if it turns slightly south again, I’ll probably have a lot more rambling to do over the next few days.