Nearly every method here takes a ``timeout`` parameter.  What do you think about just making that a class/instance attribute?  I've found it good to keep the method parameter lists as minimal as possible - It's usually easy to expand them later, but nearly always a pain to shorten them :S  Besides I think the number of calls we'll need to make with different timeout values should be small.  Most of the time we'll probably just use the default timeout (whatever that is/was).