Monday, April 07, 2008

Must See TV


Not so much about weight, more about life.

A celebration of life actually, delivered by someone where illness will almost certainly cut life short.

Over 6 million folks have watched it online already and this coming Wednesday April 9th, ABC and Diane Sawyer will be covering it in their presentation "The Last Lecture: A Love Story For Your Life" at 10pm/9 CST.

"The Last Lecture" the title refers to was actually entitled Really Achieving your Childhood Dreams and it was delivered by Dr. Randy Pausch a Professor of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon who in the summer of 2006 was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. By August 2007 the cancer was found to have spread and he was given the prognosis of 3-6 months to live.

In September of 2007 Dr. Pausch delivered a lecture at Carnegie Mellon University. It was part of a series entitled, "The Last Lecture Series" where academics are asked to present a hypothetical last lecture presenting it as if it were their last lecture; their last chance to impart whatever wisdom they felt was most important for them to share.

Clearly in Dr. Pausch's case, his last lecture wasn't necessarily just a theoretical exercise.

On Wednesday ABC will be covering Dr. Pausch's amazingly inspirational and surprisingly uplifting story. Here's their trailer:





If you'd rather, you can watch his entire "Last Lecture" online (amazing speech), but make sure you've got some time - it's nearly 2 hours long.





And lastly, if you're so inclined, you can watch the lecture Dr. Pausch himself is most proud of delivering and that's his lecture on time management. It's roughly an hour long where Dr. Pausch notes that the first 8 minutes are, "introductions I don't deserve"





Dr. Pausch is still fighting - for his own postings on his fight, feel free to head over to his update site.

Keep on slugging Dr. Pausch, and thank you.