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CMU Professor Randy Pausch's 'Last Lecture'
This is a bit of an unusual story for Slashdot- it's the "Last Lecture" of a professor at CMU who is terminally ill. His early research in VR has benefited everyone and even if you have never heard of Randy Pausch I think this is worth your time. It's a 2 hour long wmv filled with insight, laughs and wisdom from a man who has really done some amazing work. I've been watching it all morning and I think it would really be worth your time if you can spare it to listen to what he has to say. From virtual reality to education to stuffed animals and childhood dreams, there's a lot here worth your time.
Thanks drew for the link. Update: 09/21 15:44 GMT by Z : The link is already a little shakey, so you might want to turn to this cut up YouTube version of the talk instead.
He was the man who introduced me to Doom.
I often don't like the choices people make, but I like the fact that people make choices. That's why I'm a conservative.
It's kind of off-topic, but I read some inspirational lecture slides by Randy Pausch about time management a little while ago. In light of his illness, I guess there's two ways to take it: Perhaps time management isn't that important in the end, or perhaps the limited amount of time each of us may have makes it even more important.
(Or, I suppose, the stress related to worrying about time management may affect your health...)
This sucks.
...)
He was one of my classmates when I was going to graduate school in the CMU CS department (back then, it was "just" a department, not a school). He was a nice guy (and a bit of a clown).
I hadn't kept in touch, so this is the first I've heard about the cancer. (And with three young children
Here's hoping he's among the "15% - 20%" for whom the pallative care actually extends life, and that his quality of life will be (as) good (as it can be).
Ah, yes, who could forget Randy taking out his frustrations with a VCR by smashing it with a sledge hammer on the first day of class? I definitely credit Randy and that class for getting me to prioritize the end users above almost everybody else.
Perhaps time management isn't that important in the end, or perhaps the limited amount of time each of us may have makes it even more important.
.38 Mannlicher and a one-way ticket to Washington, D.C. Consequently, my eulogy would depend entirely on how I behaved during the last five minutes of my life. Why should anyone be all that concerned about what people have to say about my Fark and Slashdot habits?
Yeah, that's the question I had when I read through his PowerPoint slides yesterday morning, after the WSJ video came up in the course of my daily hour of mindless Fark surfing.
Pausch's methods are great for people who value a highly-regimented life, or who require the same to accomplish anything at all. There are people like that, and maybe he's one of them, but he overgeneralizes to a criminal extent, IMHO. Most of the worthwhile things I've accomplished can trace their beginnings to sitting around daydreaming and doing not much of anything, or looking for an excuse to put something else off. Hell, I wouldn't have seen his video and slides in the first place if I hadn't been killing time surfing the Web, right?
Ultimately, I spent half an hour watching the slides, and then went back to finish my daily list of unimportant links on Fark. I'll admit I was a little unsettled by one of the suggestions he raises ("Write your own eulogy. What do you want it to say?") because frankly, I don't know if people would find enough interesting things about me to even bother attending my funeral, and of course that bugs me. Everybody wants to leave a meaningful legacy, right? But ultimately, living by what you want your eulogist to say is just another way of living according to other people's standards. I finally managed to refute Pausch's dictums by imagining myself trying to persuade a Zen Buddhist practitioner to follow them.
You have to go your own way in life, and if you're lucky, you'll have the chance to determine how you die as well. If I were in Prof. Pausch's shoes, I'd like to think I'd wrap things up on my own terms, with a
I had the pleasure of taking Randy's first course on "User Interfaces" back in 92 or 93. How many courses have you heard of where the professor begins the first class by assailing the poor UIs of clock radios and VCRs only to immediately smash them Gallagher style in front of a classroom of undergrads. Randy was one of three truly inspirational teachers that I had the pleasure of studying under during my entire formal education. I still retain and use much of the knowledge that I learned from him.
Godspeed Randy.