Today would have been Dr. Randy Pausch’s 49th birthday. He died of pancreatic cancer but not before making one more indelible mark, “The Last Lecture“.

One of his many legacies is the Alice Project – a 3D animation environment that makes it easy for students to learn object oriented programming while creating animated movies.

As for “the Last Lecture”, here are a few of his memorable quotes …

remember, the brick walls are there for a reason.  The brick walls are not there to keep us out.  The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something.  Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough.

The best way to teach somebody something is to have them think they’re learning something else.

It’s not about how to achieve your dreams.  It’s about how to lead your life.  If you lead your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself.  The dreams will come to you.

I just saw the news that Carnegie Mellon University professor Randy Pausch lost his battle with Pancreatic Cancer. I lost count how many times I showed his “Last Lecture” video to friends and family and recommended or sent the link out.

It’s also sad, to a great extent because, today’s logo was created on March 31st. Sad because the fatality rate for pancreatic cancer is so high and so quick, the logo was nearly destined to get used. I had planned for it to appear on September 18th, the 1-year anniversary of his lecture with the hope he would still be talking about the illness and bringing his own form of inspiration to the cause.

I have never met the man. I did start using Alice as a direct result of seeing his lecture. I am also trying to get the local college to adopt it to promote more technical education opportunities and exposure. It proves one again that with the right exposure people can make a difference quickly and one that lasts.

Caregie Mellon has a page highlighting his “Enduring Legacy“.

The more I read blogs and contemplate what I should and should not blog about, I keep coming back to a series of conversations I had with Alex Morrow, and IBM Fellow, on the topic of on privacy and personal data. Those talks were before all of the blogs, the existence of MySpace.com, personal websites, and the like and the issues then are even more relevant today.

Assuming your personal information is stored in a common repository such that the necessary people can get to it quickly, how do you protect the content such that only people who should get to it , can *and* how do you change those settings quickly ?

In the conversations with Alex, the topic was medical information but it applies to al personal information including financial information. Continue reading ‘Privacy Issues with Myspace.com, SecondLife, and other online environments’ »