Buddy, can you spare the time?

Interesting rant by Vince Barnes from the HTML goodies newsletter...

A short while ago I heard one of my neighbors talking about their young son. "In his free time he's learning to write webpages," they said, "whatever that might mean!" A very basic, simple statement really, but boy, did it set my brain off! First, there's that last part: "webpages, whatever that may mean!" Come on now! OK, I will accept that there are some of our senior citizens who are not familiar with the world of modern computers and the Web, but the parents of a school age child? The notion of "webpages" should by now be about as everyday as indoor plumbing, sliced bread and microwave ovens! It may perhaps be true that the parents don't know how to go about creating webpages, which is a shame, but that's not reason enough to play dumb about the entire subject. Wouldn't it be a better idea to encourage the child, and maybe, while they're at it, have the boy show them what he's learning, "just to keep him on the right track," as it were? <g> Then there's that other part -- the part where they mentioned "free time". That's quite a notion also! If you lose money, or a job, or, and I'm so sorry for the awful thought, you lose your computer, these all can be replaced. Even lost data can eventually be regenerated. But time; if you lose time it is gone forever and can never be replaced. To be technically correct, you can't really lose time either, but you can certainly waste it. If time can be wasted then it has value. Our language even recognizes the fact since we say that we "spend" time doing one thing or another. I would argue that its irreplaceability makes time the most precious thing we have. It is not free! (Neither is it ever "spare"!) When we spend time, we are making an investment. In the future that investment will either pay off or not -- that will determine the wisdom of our investment. Education is one of the soundest investments we can make. What's more, and in my humble opinion, time invested in learning the ways of the web is never wasted time. It is valuable time, well spent!

After that, it occurs to Vince that maybe he's beeing too generous:

Of course, there is also the possibility that I misinterpreted my neighbor in another way: it is possible that "whatever that may mean" was referring to the word "learning"!