I have been lucky over the year-end holidays to spend a lot of time with my eight- and nine- year olds. The single best part of vacation for me is not to be bound by a rigid schedule and not to have the Blackberry’s vibrating syncopations set the rhythm of my day. 
 
Over the weekend, I typically spend most of my “free” time with my wife and kids, but it is never the same as on holiday.  Even if I spend two hours at my son’s soccer practice, it is a scheduled event, crammed between a tennis game and a conference call on Sunday.  The truly great luxury and restorative power of a vacation is to live schedule-free. If one of the kids wants to windsurf for another hour, who cares?  As a wise man once said, “no man on his deathbed was ever heard to exclaim, ‘Oh, if I only had had time on earth for one more conference call’.”
 
It is especially fun for me to see how my kids interact natively with technology and online media. Long before IPTV or Joost came on the scene, they had figured out that what I called “TV” in my youth is all but converged with the PC.  I watched one of their friends once try to scroll the TV to advance the channel, so persuasive has browser navigation become.
 
These digital natives need no effort to stay up on the technology, because everything they do comes paired with an intuitive lesson in machine interaction, be it the Wii, Game Boy or You Tube.  The rest of us, the so-called “digital immigrants” need to make an effort.  Not because it would be any great cultural loss if we could not figure out how to play Halo 3, but because each wave of technology assumes you have mastered the idiom of the former.
 
I watch my 86 year old mother struggle to use the cable box, not because she has mentally checked out (far from it), but because she stopped her interactions with machines with the IBM Selectric, Telex and broadcast TV. My thesis is that whenever you stop playing with the technology of the day you maroon yourself in a time capsule.  And then one day you wake up and you can no longer figure out how to start your car or certainly tune its radio, because you missed the first week of class.
 
For me this is easy, because I am perennially amazed and amused by the innovative progress of technology.  Keeping up for me is second nature.  However, even for those who are less interested in these developments, I recommend a regular play with the latest web service or i-gadget.  The alternative, I am reminded every day by my nine-year old, is to become a “Mozart” — her generic dismissive term for anyone too old to make anything work.