13 | January | 2008 | Otterman speaks...

During a gathering for a friend’s birthday celebration today, I heard about Randy Pausch, computer-science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who was diagnosed with terminal cancer when he delivered “How to Live Your Childhood Dreams” to his students and colleagues. He delivers the lecture with exuberance and says, “If I don’t seem as depressed or morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you.”

He also says, he experienced a death bed conversion: “I just bought a Macintosh.”

Here is a Wall Street Journal video report of the talk:

The full lecture (1 hour 44 min) is on Google Video.

There are more links on Wikipedia.

What were some of the other viral videos of 2007? See 6abc.com.

*** Update: Randy mentions an ETC-Singapore collaboration – here is the link.

When I need tide data in a hurry, I tend to visit the Mobile Geographics site for Sembawang – this link provides the year’s data: http://www.mobilegeographics.com:81/calendar/year/5729.html

Then I use the “find” (cmd-F) command to search for, in this case, “September”. The data for the month scrolls up and I can check the tides for the International Coastal Cleanup Singapore.

The coastal cleanup is always conducted on the 3rd Saturday of September every year on he beaches. It’s just a question of whether the mangrove cleanups will be conducted the same day.

As it turns out, it IS a low tide that morning:

20 Sep 2008
7:49 AM SGT – 1.17 m
2:13 PM SGT – 3.10 m

This means the mangrove cleanup will take place the same day as the beach cleanup.