Just thought I’d get the word out:
Rubinius (http://rubini.us) is having a Pledgie fund-raiser:
http://pledgie.com/campaign/show/87
It’s a great cause. The ten-second pitch is that it’s a next-
generation VM for Ruby with large portions being written in Ruby, and
the current roadmap is for 1.0 (MRI compatible, but higher
performance) to drop at RubyConf in October!
If that’s not something we can get excited about as a community I’m
not sure what is. 
The goal of the drive is (at least in part) to help subsidize the cost
of a Mac capable of running Parallels to spread the cross-platform
goodness.
Disclaimer: I’m not a committer to the project, just really excited
about it, so to me, it’s great to have the opportunity to contribute
in this way.