Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

Randy Pausch is a professor of virtual reality and video game design at Carnegie Mellon University. He's the creator of the amazing Alice 3D programming language for kids. He has three kids of his own, 5, 2, and 1. Professor Pausch is also dying of pancreatic cancer. Last week he gave his "Last Lecture" at CMU, telling his students what he'd learned in his life: If you're a subscriber to the Wall St Journal online you can read Jeffrey Zaslow's moving piece about the lecture there, including video. Pausch's own home page is here. What an beautiful story and an amazing person. This is what being a teacher - no, being a human - is all about.

I Hear You Knockin' But You Can't Come In

Yes my message boards were down for almost 24 hours yesterday. As were Cat's, Morgan's, and Megan's sites. They're all hosted by the generous folks at Annex.com. The outage was caused by a server move that took a little longer than expected. Mike Chandler from 2Xtreme media explains...

Greg sends his humblest apologies to y'all for the downtime but asked that I brag a bit about the new facility, so here goes... Faster pipe with BGP routing for redundant feed, 24 hour NOC, impressive power generators to keep your site online in the event of a significant power outage, and 24 hour security to ward off evil server bandits. As an added bonus, our 2Xtreme Media servers will be neighbors in the same colo facility, so I'll still have hands on access to your server as needed (that's more of a bonus for me, I suppose). We appreciate the fact that none of you tried to choke Gregory or the Annex crew yesterday for keeping you offline, but we still feel bad. Hopefully the swifter connection speeds and greater uptimes will make up for yesterday's outage.

Apology accepted. And thanks for the continued great service. Leoville Town Square alone sucks up about 30GB of Annex's bandwidth each month. I really appreciate their generosity! That's one of the reasons I spread the site out over four servers now. It's all accessible from Leoville.com, but if any one site is down, you can always reach the rest by going there directly:

Leoville.com, the main site	http://www.leoville.com
Leo's Mob, my mobile phone picture blog	http://leoville.textamerica.com
Two Shows Nightly, my text blog (you're soaking in it)	http://leo.typepad.com
Leoville Town Square, the message boards	http://leovilletownsquare.com