The Last Lecture (David's Blog)

Randy Pausch is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He is losing his battle with pancreatic cancer and is expected to live for a few more months.

CMU has a lecture series entitled, "The Last Lecture." It is supposed to be your chance to talk about things that matter deeply to you. For Randy, it really may be his last lecture.

I first watched his 10 minute reprise of his lecture as a email forward...

After watching it, I wanted to see more. Here is the full video (76 min) from his original talk, "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams..."

The second video is more sincere and drawn out and I recommend viewing it.

Also, I was surprised to see a co-worker in the second video, Tommy Burnette. Tommy got a nice shout out from Randy for following his dreams to work on Star Wars.

I've seen Randy's work at SIGGRAPH's Emerging Technologies. He's worked on a VR project called "Alice."

Randy was involved in the Aladdin Magic Carpet Ride ride at DisneyQuest, which I tried out during SIGGRAPH '98 Orlando.

In his "last lecture," Randy announced one of his childhood dreams of "being Captain Kirk"...since then, J.J. Abrams gave him a role with a line in the upcoming Star Trek movie.