10 Things to do during a sick day
by Aner Ravon

Taking a sick day has a special flare to it. When I was in elementary school I could not wait to catch the flu and stay at home for a few days. It was like a surprise birthday party. You get to stay home, watch TV and you get taken care of throughout. All this for basically doing nothing and watching all the TV you want! Wow! some of my educational cornerstones were carved watching reruns of the Israeli version of PBS. Back in the late 70s and early 80s, reruns dated back to the 50s and 60s and there weren’t too many to choose from so selection was easy. The only daytime TV channel was PBS anyway, so yes, the experience was a little “soviet” but nonetheless very educational.

Yesterday I came down with the flu which lead to taking a sick day today. While taking a sick day still has it’s perks, it’s quite different then my memoirs. There are two main differences. First, for some reason the flu really feels like crap at 34. Nothing like the surprise “stay home and do nothing” party I remembered. Second, the internet has replaced TV as the time killing instrument for the slightly ill. Having gone through a couple of hours of point and glaze, I gathered a few time killing pointers that can help you next time around:

1. del.icio.us (mine is anerravon and I am just getting started) - remember “Sliver”? the horrible, straight to video, B movie starring Sharon Stone? It co-starred Stephen Baldwin is an obsessed peeper who installed cameras at each room and apartment of the building he ran. Like peeping? Delicious is for you. you can spend hours navigating between sites and personal favorites of others. Great time killing, even through I still get more interesting websites per 5 minutes doing a simple Google.

2. Linkedin - you can kill at least an hour going through the updated status of your networked colleagues. You can see who moved up, who started their own business and who got out. If you feel a little low doing that to others then chill. they are doing the same to you.

3. Netvibes - after finally making me install Firefox, Netvibes is now my home page. I killed at least 30 minutes in importing my favorite blogs to my home page and then additional 30 minutes in distributing them in tabs and inside the tabs. AJAX is very time killing friendly.

4. Degardener’s web-press stats. I never imagined it was possible to dissect viewers in so many meaningless ways. Viewers table by the file type they actually downloaded from your blog?? come on! But it can keep your mind busy for at least 5 minutes.

5. Editing your OPML file - I hear the typcial “get RSS feeds” to “actually read them” ratio is 1:5. Mine, I have to admit, is closer to 1:50. Cleaning up the OPML file is fun because it clearly demonstrates how overflooded with information we are. I cleaned up at least 50 blogs and stuck to the ones I actually hope to read one day.

6. Crunchnotes - this “indi” little brother of Techcrunch is a collection of cunning thoughts worth reading. I especially enjoyed the “we all skip TV ads” note. Reminded me of my college days when I could not grasp why anyone would fund researches that conclude that “alcohol makes people horny” and that “people with money are attracted to people with money”.

7. 53,014 - that’s the number of blogs I found that covered the recent launch of Google calendar. With a show of hands - is there anybody who didn’t know about that? I guess that leaves 53,013 other people who needed to kill some time.

8. Social search - I spent some serious time looking for good social search apps this morning. It followed the recent (and good) entry at Mashable. I tried all of them. Nice, but didn’t knock me off my feet. I am still looking for something that can do something more social then filtering of info through tags.

9. Eonline - go through all the stars you remember vaguely and see where they are today. Also compate their birthdays to yours. Great recipe for developing an age complex.

10. Recorded episodes of Prison Break - masterpiece, masterpiece masterpiece.

Feel well and make better use for your time than I did today!

Aner Ravon
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