Dan Bornstein

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Slumming on lolfbmoments.com:

• "Ladies and Gentlemen... my sister is a whore."
• "Werewolf."
• "Thundercats."
• "Sunglasses."

can somebody on discogs approve this already? it's been yellow flagged for like a year.

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• 10:19 Had my first yoga/pilates/bellydance class with Cera Byer at Shoebox Studio last night. MORE PLEASE! #

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Overtime by Charles Stross.

I'm too young for this mid-life crisis, and yet
it grinds on, urging me to quit my job three days
before Christmas and become a yogi, a teacher,
a sailor, a student, just a week before a New Year
I'm not ready to ring in without a cigarette, a shot
glass full of fuck-it, and the familiar sense that my life
is a serious of missteps, the backwards waltz
of a drunken, three-legged pit bull in a sequined gown
on a television dance competition.

There's magic there, and sometimes it's funny,
but I never make it to the finals stage.
No, this dog and I--this graceless street mutt and I--
we whirl and turn and occasionally fall down, laughing.
We kick our five legs not quite in unison, the world's
sloppiest can-can, and both wake up hungover,
me holding my head waiting for the spinning to stop,
the dog asking in its dog language, "Are we there yet?"

I almost never actually visit the Facebook web site: I follow it through a feed reader (in my case, NetNewsWire) along with all of my other feeds.

Besides the obvious benefits to this, one great side effect is that you never, ever see the output of applications (e.g., quiz results) or the other useless noise like "so-and-so is now friends with someone else you already know". The only drawback I've found is that you also don't see notifications about photos that your friends have uploaded. (You do see links that they post, however: just not Facebook-hosted photos. It's a bizarre omission.)

Anyway, I just had to explain to someone how to accomplish this feat, which made me realize how completely non-obvious Facebook has made this. Finding these feeds is a complete pain in the ass. They've really gone out of their way to hide the URLs you need to use.

So. You have to subscribe to three or four different feeds.

1. Posts: Find the Posts feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/posted.php. On the upper right of the page is a gray box, and at the bottom of that box is a link entitled "My Friends' Links" with the RSS logo next to it. Copy that URL. Subscribe to it in your feed reader. This is the RSS URL for any links and (external) images that your friends post.

2. Notes: Find the Notes feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/notes.php and repeating the above. This is the RSS URL for things that your friends post via the "Notes" app, which is (I guess) the more blog-like way of posting long things to Facebook.

3. Notifications: Find the Notifications feed by going to http://www.facebook.com/notifications.php and repeating the above. This is the RSS URL for things like "so-and-so commented on your status". You might not care to subscribe to this one because you can get all of these kind of notifications in email.

4. Status Updates: This is the RSS URL for the "What are you doing?" Twitter-like part of Facebook. This is the one you probably care about, and it is trickier, because Facebook no longer links to the feed URL! Nice one guys. You have to construct this URL by editing one of the above URLs. E.g., take the "Notes" URL and change the part of the URL that says "friends_notes" to "friends_status". Keep the parts of the URL before and after that, including the magic numbers at the end.

There. Wasn't that SIMPLE?

Previously: How to use Livejournal with a feed reader.

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• 09:14 I have an unfortunate case of senioritis. I'm not a senior, about to go on vacation from work, or about to quit my job. #

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DNA Lounge update, wherein the holiday cheer continues apace.

Sometimes I wish there were a way to funnel the most ridiculous moments that happen in the comments to things I post on Facebook to Livejournal so that you could all share in the fun.

Sunset in the necropolis.

We're standing on the edge of Qatar and the land in the distance is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. That's probably as close as I will ever get to Saudi.

I went for a horseback ride through the necropolis of Giza today. This is the pyramid Khafre behind me. My horse's name is Lucky.

Which picture was taken first? And did they move the cannonballs?