MarteyDodoo.com

From a BBC News article on the dangers of drinking too much coffee:
The Department of Health (DoH) advises people not to drink more than five single espressos - roughly seven instant coffees - a day, although individuals vary in their sensitivity.
Drinking one cup this morning was enough to make me wake up at 9 PM [...]

I have been trying to write about what went wrong with my laptop and my experiences with IBM/Lenovo's warranty repair services. It is slow going, though, since the events in question encompass the last month. I have everything outlined right now, but it needs to be fleshed out properly (because nobody likes reading bulleted lists). [...]

A few weeks ago, I went to a Bank of America ATM, where I was in line behind a red-haired woman having a cell phone conversation. "Wow," she said, looking at a discarded receipt, "some person deposited x in their account. Now they have 2x. I wish I had 2x!" As she left, I smiled. [...]

In general, I shy away from Flash-based games. I am not sure whether it is because of the low quality of most Flash games (i.e. stick figures) or because I feel guilty about wasting time or simply because most of them are not really that much fun. There are only so many times you can [...]

My dreams as a imperfect mirror into my soul.

Last week, after I returned from Ghana, I assumed that I would upload most of the many pictures I had taken in-country to this website. Now, I am not so sure. There are four reasons why:

Malaise - there are Other Things which I should be doing besides uploading and organizing photos. These include replying to [...]

In the wake of what must be the world's least funniest April Fools joke, I have returned from my trip to Ghana. Expect multiple posts (and some pictures) from the trip, assuming that I get organized and actually construct coherent, non-rambling pieces of writing from my notes.
The picture at the left (or above, if you [...]

Two nights ago, I dreamed that it was Friday (today) and that I was traveling on the Red Line with some of my co-workers. Somehow, I got left behind and was stranded at a newly constructed station, which was named either Douglas or Coupland. The station was sponsored by Apple, so Steve Jobs was on [...]

Part of the reason that I have not written anything lately is that I have been busy rolling my own CMS (long story; no time to send you the NDA) - when you are worried about how to best code a blogging system, you find that you even visiting your blog makes you feel guilty.[1]
Regardless, [...]

Yesterday, I made a mistake while configuring Postfix, the program that deals with email on my server.[1] The result of this was that I received no email over a 24 hour period stretching from approximately noon on Saturday to noon today.
I have misconfigured Postfix before, but have always realized my mistake within a much shorter [...]

I am sympathetic to the fact that some people have trouble pronouncing my name; it is not particularly easy. While I am always surprised when people get it right on the first try, mispronunciation of my name is not a cardinal sin.
Unless you are contacting me electronically. If you are sending an message to an [...]

Today is my birthday. To celebrate, I bought myself a slew of presents, including the Sony Ericsson W810i you can see in the picture at the right. Since it has a decent camera, expect more photos. I spent the entire day at home, assembling flat-packed furniture from IKEA armed with only a Leatherman Wave and [...]

A list of 10 albums that I enjoyed in 2006.

I have not been particularly happy with my blogging output in the past couple of weeks (December is half over, and only two posts?), but I have been busy with various projects, both in and out of my day job.
It is not going to get better, because I have sent my ThinkPad back to Lenovo. [...]

About how GMail made me start hating email, and possible steps to resolve this issue. Not about Ubuntu.

A long post on WPLY, the Philadelphia radio station known as Y100, that was located at 100.3 Mhz on FM radio and its influence on me.

A year ago, I was reading Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha:
And then, for an hour, he became aware of the strange life he was leading, of him doing lots of things which were only a game, of, though being happy and feeling joy at times, real life still passing him by and not touching him.

A very long post about graduating from Harvard; not reading enough; and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over two thousand words! Nine footnotes! Four pictures! One very long digression!

On Saturday night, my fingers were crushed in my bedroom door.[1] When I was little, my siblings and I regularly got our fingers caught in doors, so the pain is somewhat familiar to me. This is by far the worst case. Finger-by-finger:

My thumb is unhurt.
My index finger has two cuts on its side, right next [...]

This is why I made SleepTune - which really needs to be ported to Linux.

I was excited to see that the Harvard International Review, the magazine where I used to hold the position of Web Editor, now has its own blog, entitled The Big Picture.
I first noticed the magazine when I received a complimentary copy in the freshman mailing. I can recall being impressed by both its professional writing [...]

Lately, I have been looking at this website's traffic. If you were to graph traffic in number of actual people visiting the site and reading the content here, your graph would look a lot like a bell graph, with the highest number of people visiting in the summer months (June through August). This seems reasonable, [...]

Since I have been waiting for this concert since it was announced back in July, I had high expectations for this concert. For a long period of time (July to late September), I assumed that I would have to go to the concert alone, since most of my friends are not interested in indie music [...]

(01:20:17) [redacted]: or do you just not use linux in real life but stump for it everywhere?
As I noted in my last entry, it is difficult for me to write about the day-to-day occurrences in my life. Simply put, this is not that kind of web log.
Still, I noticed today as I was attempting to [...]

The best part of my room is the ridiculously large window and the view it offers - the Dunster courtyard, Memorial Drive, and the Charles river. It is above the House library (which has even larger windows) and a few floors below Dunster's tower. If I was going to take a picture of Dunster, the [...]

I found this on my desk when I came home from work. Click on the image to enlarge.
Hopefully, a hive restore will do the trick. Regardless, seeing this made me feel as if I was in some kind of simplistic video game, with wave after wave of broken computers attacking or something.

Malaise. Dissatisfaction. Apathy.

Martey discusses Sufjan Stevens - with himself. In schizophrenic interview format.

Lately, my dreams have been worrying me. Normally, I retain some lucidity when dreaming (I have written about this topic twice before, here and here), which I think allows me a slightly greater margin of subconscious control over them. For example, I rarely have nightmares anymore. When I was little, my only recourse during nightmares [...]

Instead of reading the latest Harry Potter book, I spent last night reading Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha. I have intended to read the book since junior year of high school, when one of my friends noted similarities between an English essay I had written entitled "Under the Tire" with Hesse's novel Beneath the Wheel.
Siddhartha was far [...]

I feel having no unread items a great accomplishment, especially considering that a number of days ago, there were about 4500 items. Almost 900 of them were unread. That means in about 48 hours, I have read, skimmed, or otherwise parsed almost 4000 different news articles.
Using Gregarius is a lot different than using Sage. Gregarius [...]

I would describe my relationship with sleep as adversarial; I do not really like it, and I am convinced it does not like me. There is something about it that reeks of wasted time and missed opportunities, two things which I feel I have more than enough experience with during my waking hours.
Part of my [...]

Ghana is a good kid in a really bad neighborhood. Its West African neighbors, from Liberia to Sierra Leone to the Ivory Coast, have bred so much fighting in the last 10 years that they make Ghana seem like Iowa.
From today's New York Times editorial page, "A Fragile Success in Africa:"
Ghana does not have insurgents [...]

BBC: Chechen leader Maskhadov killed.
Upon doing a search, I have discovered that I have never really written about Aslan Maskhadov on this blog, and that I have rarely mentioned Chechnya. This makes summing all of my feelings up very difficult.

As I become exposed to more music, I become increasingly certain that one's personal experiences determine what type of music one likes. If I had not grown up in Willingboro, an almost stereotypical example of the American suburb, I think the fact that four of the tracks on The Arcade Fire's album Funeral contain the [...]

For my birthday, I decided to buy a MP3 player. After much consideration (I considered Neuros' strange dual player combination, as well as the Rio Karma), I finally decided on an iPod. The fact that part of my digital music collection is in AAC format was the biggest draw. While I did have fifty of [...]

And I have been since Sunday, although I was feeling better on Monday. I have missed a number of classes so far this week, so I have a boatload of homework to catch up on. So I may not post until Christmas. This also means I may not have time to fix the Ha'aretz RSS [...]

A strange text message on my cell phone:
Message From
484-919-####
Ramadan
Mubarak!!!
10/15/04 12:16 am
The phone number resolves to Norristown, Pennsylvania's exchange. While, as I have written earlier, my cell phone number belonged to a young man named Carmine, I assume (based on his name and on the people who call him) that he does not celebrate Ramadan. Once [...]

It has been a busy couple of weeks. I wanted to post, but never had enough time to properly flesh out the topics that I wanted to write about. While it would be impossible (and dangerous) for me to maintain summer levels of activity, I am going to try to write at least once a [...]

…for posting your product manuals online in PDF format, including the one for my roommate's alarm clock [PDF, obvs.], which rings — at least, it used to ring — every night at midnight.
Incidently, I was unable to find a manual for my alarm clock, a Sony Dream Machine (model ICF-C390), online, but I did learn [...]

One of the reasons that I use Linux is because I am addicted to updates (another is that I am a masochist, as previous events will show). Waiting several years for new features (much less bugfixes!) is ridiculous. Sometimes, one pays a price for being on the cutting edge.
About a week and a half, I [...]