Oh boy, so much to reply to.
First to my old buddy applewhore. I'm REALLY worried about you so please be careful in the sun! Meanwhile, you might be happy to know I have successfully chipped away all the ice from my front steps! I would like to explore the sailing clicker too, but we are soon to buy a house and I need to show some fiscal responsibility here at home! Still, that cracks me up about your presentations and people being distracted by your own tech savvyness. There has to be some way to turn that to your advantage. Do you remember a really old Apple ad - way back when the laser printer came out - where a team presented a set of really slick documents and the customer asked, "How did you do this?" They responded, "Hire us and we'll tell you." Maybe you should use something like that!
andrefrancis2 - I think you and me and applewhore have a lot in common. As we accumulate more and more stuff including computers, home audio and video, phones (cell and at home), PDAs, lighting, appliances... we ask ourselves "Why can't all our stuff communicate?" As we get more and more stuff designed to make our lives easier, it actually ends up complicating it (or for our spouses!). There are plenty of little solutions out there for specific things, but it is nowhere near having it all come together.
On the other hand, if you are REALLY rich, it is not a problem. I frequent a local high end audio/video store where customers here in Connecticut spend up to $200,000 to have their homes automated including security, phone and audio/video all over the house. For example, I am enjoying a movie in my custom home theater and someone presses the intercom at my lovely estate's security gate. The movie screen displays a message that someone is at my gate. I pick up the phone set and the movie volume instantly mutes. I speak to the person at the gate, discover it is my decorator with some new home designs and I buzz them in the gate by pressing a certain key on my phone (which also unlocks the front door so I don't need to get up and let them in). By the way, there are options for having the intercom audio routed to the house audio system, microphones and speakers, but I didn't want to digress!
What we seem to need is "home automation for the rest of us." I think all of this is obvious to the whole consumer electronics world and new protocols and devices are coming around, but will it really be innovative and easy to use? Who knows, but the #1 experts at innovation and ease of use are, in my opinion, Apple.
In addition, just what is making home computers "sexy" out there these days? Not much if you ask me. PC home sales are slowing down as the need for faster and faster hardware to run the latest version of Word is not such a big deal. There is an appeal for video editing and images, music files..., but most people see their current home computers (Mac or PC) as pretty adequate for what they need. Perhaps newer computers with software that enables them to be a much more powerful home command center (ie a "digital hub") would spark interest and the IT economy in terms of home users - that and a whole range of devices built around protocols for communication, networking and control...
Only geeks like us are going to shop around and explore all the latest little new things and struggle to get them working. "The rest of us" (and those without the budgets to have it all installed for them) want it all in a box!
Forgive me, I didn't recognize you on your earlier posts! 
