i used to come home to visit family in brooklyn and feel like i was stepping into the past.  sure, this is new york, it's hardly the middle of nowhere, but still...a year ago i couldn't even really get people to understand the concept of a "technology nonprofit".  now i'm using the free wireless that's spilling over from the neighbor's house while watching coverage of last week's games for change conference on ny1, and my sister, who teaches history to 7th graders at a local public school, got a better laptop from her job than i did from mine.  next semester, every kid in her class will get their own laptop, and hers will be hooked up to the SMARTboard, an electronic white board that will allow her to share images, videos, and websites with her students.  She's really excited about all this, though not for exactly the same reasons that I am.  "Chalk", she says, "can be really hard to clean."