Several months ago I came across Randy Pausch's time management lecture, and read about his now-famous Last Lecture. Since then, Prof. Pausch has been in the news quite a bit, since his lectures had a special context: he had been diagnosed several months earlier with incurable cancer.

Prof. Pausch achieved, in my opinion, what very few people do who present inspirational and motivational messages. He wasn't fake. He wasn't in it for the money. He didn't lie.

In fact, he would have--and did--say that he wasn't unusual, that lots of people were in his situation. When faced with impending death, time management isn't a buzz phrase any more. Achieving your dreams, balancing your life and your work, all take on urgency and clarity.

I miss this man I never met. I'll live my life better because of his example.

Randy Pausch web site <- difficult to access right now.
Carnegie Mellon University commencement speech
Dr. Gabriel Robins' site about his friend. <- It was this site that first lead me to Prof. Pausch.

My spiffy new Fujitsu laptop has some special buttons that can be set to launch programs. The utility for setting these lets me choose programs from the Start menu. Here's a screenshot of it finding those Start menu programs.

#1 Why does this take so long?

#2, and Far More Aggravating:
No matter how politely, don't ask me to wait a "moment." This is going to take longer than a moment. If it's only going to take a moment, you don't have to tell me about it because I won't notice a moment going by. If it's only going to take a moment, you don't have to create an entire screen with a very long progress bar. Tell the truth. This is going to take quite a while, isn't it? I'm going to curse you for how long this takes, aren't I? You're going to make it very clear how something that really should take only a moment takes, in fact, nineteen seconds of my life and attention. In those nineteen seconds, I may rethink my life's ambitions, consider a new career path, begin work on a fabulous opera, hunger for real Cordon Blue instead of the crappy frozen stuff from Stouffer's.

Never mind that you don't show the utility on the task bar, making me minimize other windows to find it again.

Or that you advise, like an ignorant illiterate, "when a Application Panel is pressed," instead of "when an Application Panel button is pressed."

Here are a few links I enjoyed recently.

First up, Aztec whistles. This guy reproduces them, and the sound (click on Slideshow) is truly creepy. In fact, it's scary.
Aztec Whistles of Death

Weddings are strange things. This lively article reveals a few surprises.
Bizarre Origins of Wedding Traditions

Finally, the web before the web. This manual, cross-indexed information system was, in my opinion, far more impressive than today's world wide web.
The Mundaneum Museum