Friends sent me an excerpt of his final lecture at Carnegie Mellon University on my Facebook FunWall from a YouTube video. Then I saw a brief mention of his "life lessons" on the IT Manager Connection blog. As I quickly glanced through Stephen Ibaraki's blog entry, my interest was piqued by Alice, the software whose objective is to teach high school and college students how to write video games but whose "head fake" is to actually teach them object-oriented programming. I am talking about Randy Pausch, a computer science professor who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in September 2006.
As I mentioned in a comment on Stephen's post, the excerpted YouTube video doesn't even come close to the impact of the entire lecture (and which can be found in full here: http://www.cmu.edu/homepage/multimedia/randy-pausch-lecture.shtml ).
Randy and I are both IT geeks. We both love aspects of academia. we both have a loving wife and children who mean the world to us. And, of course, we have both been touched by cancer.
But there most of the similarities end. I have no evidence of disease, but Randy is struggling through palliative chemotherapy, the best outcome being a few more months of purchased time, something Randy called "a small price to pay for walking around."
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