CourtneyP

incapacitated:
adj 1: lacking in or deprived of strength or power; “lying ill and helpless” [syn: helpless] 2: incapacitated by injury or illness [syn: disabled, handicapped]

I really don’t like being sick. I’ve been pretty much incapacitated for the past 36 hours, fighting this nasty bug, complete with body aches, sore throat and sinus congestion.

Luckily, I had meetings here in The City yesterday morning, which enabled me to go home right after and collapse in bed (or rather, lie in bed with the laptop). Today, I was either in bed or on the futon in the living room for most of the day. Stayed pretty low-key… e-mails, IMs, phone calls. Not really a lot of fun, I felt like I could be doing something more, but I resisted the urge to get up and attempt to be more productive. Gotta rest up.

I should be past my contagious stage tomorrow, so I hope to go to work to catch up on some things, attend our big company meeting and then partake in the cheesy geeky goodness that is Web 1.0.

There were these tampons on sale at the store, a brand I had never seen before, “Dittie”. A strange name to begin with, but hell, when things like this are on sale, I’ll buy them because I need them.

The concept behind these “Ditties” is that, kinda like a fortune cookie, each individual unit has a supposedly inspirational saying printed on the wrapper. Unlike a fortune cookie, you cannot eat them after adding on the “in bed” ending onto the little quip. They printed stuff on ‘em like “If you’re going to wait around for Mr. Right, might as well have fun with Mr. Wrong.” and “You go girl!”. I find it disturbing that my feminine products are urging me to, um, “Go”.

I just about lost it the other day when I pulled one of these Ditties out of the box. It read:
“Every girl has a little Dittie in them.”

I wanted to cry. I mean, for chrissakes, bleeding monthly is difficult enough to endure as it is.

I pulled up the driveway to my parents’ house this evening, curiously spying the kids at the preschool across the street. All the kids were clinging to the chainlink fence, all staring in the same direction. It was almost like a scene from Village of the Damned. I then noticed a car stopped along the road, the driver seemingly nervous, her attention switching back and forth between the children and the passenger side of her car. I first thought that maybe the kids were looking at the driver’s dog, which was a gorgeous golden retriever who was happily smiling out the passenger window.

As I exited the car, I was greeted with a familiar, yet odd sound.
cluck cluck cluck… CLUCK

I was taken aback for a moment. It is an unusual sound to hear this at my parents’ house, of all places. Sure, their house is somewhat near a few farms, but not close enough for chickens to wander randomly into! I was accustomed to this when we lived in Hawaii, but not here in Bay Area Suburbia!

I cautiously approaced the other side of my mom’s car, to find myself face to face with a very large rooster!

He was very healthy and robust. His feathers were very clean, and the colors bright. I wondered who was missing their Rooster at this very moment.

I looked down at the street, where the driver of the aforementioned car was talking to a few boys on the sidewalk. “Don’t chase it, boys!” She yelled. “I mean it!” I gathered that these kids were her sons.

I yelled down to them, “Is this your, um, chicken?” They all shook their heads “no”.

The rooster started heading down the driveway. I feared that it would get hit by a car coming around the turn.

My sister had come out of the house since I had yelled, “Why is there A CHICKEN in the driveway?!” She started walking towards it, digital camera in hand. The rooster became startled and cut across our driveway to the next yard, the sun starting to set. At least he was heading uphill rather than towards the street. I wonder if we’ll ever see him again.

When I arrived inside the house, I was told a story of how my parents were awakened this morning by the sound of a rooster crowing. My dad thought that it was the alarm clock, and kept hitting the snooze button. My mom got suspicious that my four year old niece had been messing with their alarm clock and switched it to a rooster crow (“I didn’t know we had that sound on our alarm clock!”). I had unknowingly solved The Mystery of the Persistent Alarm Clock.

I then soon remembered that today is the beginning of the Chinese New Year, specfically, the Year of the Rooster. I wonder if this whole funny episode will bring us good luck.

At this month’s South Bay Blogger Meeting as well as the Geek Dinner the other night, a hot topic of discussion is the XHTML Friends Network, or XFN. Thanks to Tantek, Matthew and Eric, we have a new and simple way to indicate the relationships between the humans behind the blogs. Simply put:

XFN (XHTML Friends Network) is a simple way to represent human relationships using hyperlinks. In recent years, blogs and blogrolls have become the fastest growing area of the Web. XFN enables web authors to indicate their relationship(s) to the people in their blogrolls simply by adding a ‘rel’ attribute to their tags…

The integration is easy, and the potential is great. I am not necessarily writing off other social networking methods, but XFN seems to be the simplest method. As Tantek put it the other night, why spend time entering all your information into several third party social networking sites when you can do it all on your own site?

I hope you will give XFN a chance so we can see it grow. The best way to test this out is to get everyone to use it… so do it now!

effin’ comcast. I was tuning in to watch CFH when I discovered that they took away my TechTV and put a spanish channel in its place! THEN, they move TechTV to a higher channel and make it a premium channel that I would have to pay *more* for!

¡¿qué la cogida?!

Sorry, Chris. I love ya, but I hate the networks and cable companies. Grr.

NEWS FLASH! 15:32: OMG! He blew the taco stand!