As a boy I saw myself someday as a Harvard man in a maroon blazer, a rep tie, wearing one of those flat straw hats - a boater - and singing whatever passes for a whiffenpoof song in Cambridge, Massachusetts. These were big dreams for a barefoot kid with a cane pole in a rowboat on the river with a coffee can full of nightcrawlers at his feet. Needless to say they didn’t come true. For one thing, that whole Gatsby thing was long over by the time I got to college. For another, I couldn’t have afforded Harvard on a full scholarship. And just to tidy this up, I probably wouldn’t have been accepted if I’d applied. And anyway, who wears a boater before Memorial Day?

What I have to thank Harvard for today is my new graphics card, a 512 MB ATI Radeon X1300. I skimped on the graphics when I bought the PC, because I am not a gamer. For the last couple years the gamers have been emergent into mainstream community and communications. I’ve ducked into the Second Life site a couple of times but never could pick a name. Today, I figured I’d bite the bullet and load up something generic (also, I picked a great name!). I wanted to see how the gen ex boys and girls with Second Life avatars were synched into the Berkman Beyond Broadcast meetings. It’s a huge download, but when Second Life was finally installed on my desktop machine, the application puked on my underpowered graphics card. I could have dug the laptop out from under the pile of magazines and consumer credit bills, booted it up and gone through that whole installation process again, but by then I’d checked out the wiki and crawled around the conference web site a little. It seemed pretty much like you had to be there. (Although, now that its over, the Wiki looks like a rich source for catch-up notes on most of what they talked about today).

I opted for a game of canine frisbee fetch instead, followed by a face to face planning session for a town hall meeting on some local issues, but I vowed not to be caught short next time there’s a Berkman gathering like that in virtual space. I ran out to Best Buy and overpaid for something I hope will be adequate, and now I have Harvard to thank for today’s retail therapy session and my new graphics card.