I think it's crunch time. It's that time of the school year when everyone and their mother wants my attention. For those of you who may not know, I am currently on Academic Probation. AP means that I got under a 2.0 in one semester (last one obviously) and that in order to get off of it, I need to score a C or higher in ALL of my classes. So there are three weeks of school and one class that I seriously need to score high on the final. I guess I will be reading a lot of psychology books before the end of this time.

Additionally, my fiance and I are in the process of moving to St. Paul. We will be living pretty darned close to the Saints stadium so if you want to hang out or something call.

Some of the neat things I have done with technology recently are:
1) Play with a mac that had a 32 " monitor.
2) Build a chat server and client in python.
3) Rebuilt gentoo on my laptop (IBM T 42)

Some interesting research I have read recently:
1) "Illusions of Competence in Study" by Koriat, A. and Bjork, R., located at : http://research.haifa.ac.il/~iipdm/personal_homepages/Papers/illusions_of_competence_in_monitoring.pdf
2) "Stanford Prison Study" by Zimbardo, P., located at : http://www.prisonexp.org/
3) "Cyberstalking, personal privacy, and moral responsibility" by Tavani, H. T. and Grodzinsky, F. S., Available through ACM.

Not really, but it is such a catchy title. I guess there really is not much to report on my front other than the fact that school has been keeping me quite busy. Cognative psychology had it's first Midterm and I did not do soo hot on it. I gave a speech in my public speaking class and I had everything down until I got up there and saw the camera. I totally choked on it, but I guess I recovered enough to pull off a B on it. As for my Internet Programming course I am all straight A's ( 100% even ) so that is uplifting. This Friday I have a Midterm exam for Social Psychology that I am not looking forward to.

The wedding planning has been going really well. We made the "Save the Dates" by hand and that has been really fun. I am glad that we are putting such a personal touch on our wedding, even though it is soo much work. Of course the toughest part of wedding planning is putting together the guest list.

The community forums that I have been using for my World of Warcraft guild just released a full new version of their product and I must say it is TOP NOTCH! You can find out more at http://www.communityserver.org/ . If you are interested in knowing more about my guild and you play WoW you can visit http://wow-lastrites.com/

I have an Intel D865PERL motherboard and I decided to go from 1024 MB PC3200 Memory to 3072 MB of PC3200 Memory. I went out and bought 2 1024 MB sticks of memory and inserted them into the two open slots turned it on and it worked. Although there were intermitten errors (and it was not passing memtest). I was getting confused because I thought gone were the days where memory needed to be in similar channels.

Then I read the documentation (shocking I know) ftp://download.intel.com/design/motherbd/rl/C3176401.pdf and on page 24 I realized that I had it setup in the motherboard to run in what they call "Dual Channel with Dynamic Mode" which is the "most optimal" way to run memory. Although it requires that ALL 4 slots have the same size, and type of memory in it (ie; same number of DIMMS).

D'oh, so anyways I took out the two 512 MB sticks and rebooted and it worked just fine. I could have run it in what they call "Dual Channel without Dynamic Mode" but I would have lost the extra caching power and speed because of the overhead of the BIOS trying to figure out what type of memory it is writing to. Anyways three days to figure out this issue all because just like normal men, I figured I was above reading the documentation. Lesson learned.

Well this year in school is going quite well I might say versus the hell that I survived last. All of my professors seem fair and the course content seems manageable. My intro to cognative psychology professor reminds me of $i(Alan Rickman) from Harry Potter. My intro to social psychology teacher reminds me of a care bear (seriously she is just too fru fru for me). The professor for my internet programming class is way cool, but I already knew that. The professor for my public speaking class is nothing to be proud of.

I am shooting for all A's because the way I look at it, if I do not get the A's I will at least get C's. That is all I need for my Academic Probation to go away and thus make me happy again. The wedding planning is going well and I am actually on the phase of making the list(s). I am glad I know a lot about computers it makes things like this at least a little bit more bearable. I coined a phrase today "You don't know how many people you know until you really need to know how many people you know." I find it amusing anyways.

One of the many things that is always been a curiousity of mine is how the power of persuasion can affect the lives of soo many people. This is going to be one of the topics we focus on in social psychology so I am anxious to learn about that. Otherwise life is pretty much wake up, school, work, go home and read.

:-)

Listening to: Pink Floyd, The Happiest Days of Our Lives

This last year has been a boon, several blessings and a few mistakes. Because of this I have finally decided how I am going to store all of my Blog enteries now and you can pretty much guarantee that this will be my final resting place blog wise. With that being said here is my annual year in review.

In January I found out from Microsoft that I was not the fit that they were looking for with the position I applied to. In Feburary I found myself with a boot to the eye during full contact snow football, I donated part of my lunch from Arby's to a homeless person and I took a deep look at my past relationships. March through June I found myself doing school work and trying to graduate.

This summer I ended up proposing to my lovely fiance at the Japanese gardens in Como Park. I also worked full time during an internship with a big company named Unisys. I learned much about my organizational and development skills while there.

Then fall came and I overloaded myself. I did this knowingly and willingly so I will not complain about it too much. Suffice to say though I almost got through the whole thing unscathed. I ended up failing Biology 1001 so I will end up taking that course yet again.

Up until that point though I have been planning out the Wedding and all of the finite details. If I know you be sure to e-mail me your snail mail address so that I have current records of it since that is how I am going to send out invites.

I made a decision today on how my online life was going to be handled. Today on forward I am going to hold three online weblogs. The first one at http://community.jwendl.net/blogs/jwendl/default.aspx will be my development weblog where I will do most of my development talking and where anonymous commenting will be disabled. Then there will be this one http://blog.jwendl.net/ where I will talk about everything (personal, developmental, psychological and gaming) and where anonymous commenting will be allowed. Then lastly for my personal endeavors I will cross post over into my LiveJournal account http://jwendl.livejournal.com/.