A colleague of mine has been using Watir and needed to retry evaluating an expression a number of times until it works (I'm sure IE::wait should be taking care of things, but apparently not in this case). What he came up with was fully functional, but even to my relatively inexperienced eye didn't look Ruby-esque. So this is what I came up with instead:

module PdbMisc
    # ttata = "Try, try and try again!"
    # Example usages below
    def ttata(timeout=3, interval=1, logger=nil)
        raise "Block expected" unless block_given?
        while true
            begin
                return yield
            rescue
                logger.call "ttata: failed - #{$!}" if logger
                timeout -= interval
                raise if timeout <= 0
                sleep interval
            end
        end
    end
end

Now you've got to love a language that makes this sort of thing so easy... See it in all it's syntax-highlighted glory over in the coding samples section of my family website, along with some example calls as well. Enjoy!