Childhood dreams are important, do you remember yours? I can tell you some of mine. I wanted to fly. Fly like superman, I can't tell you how many good bath towels got used as capes and snagged on the old swing set as I'd try to jump of the swings and grab the "cape" to fly. I wanted to be a computer programmer (yes, honestly I was a geek from way back. I'd check out byte magazine from the local library and then type in the programs into the Apple IIe they had in grammar school) I wanted to be a photographer. I was always fascinated with cameras and how the worked. I took pictures in my head all the time as a little kid.

Well now that I'm a "grown-up" I've looked back and can see that I've actually achieved some of my childhood dreams. By day I'm a Sr. Web Developer,  so definitely get to program computers. In fact I get to program for all computers that have an internet connection. How cool is that?

Of course my hobby is photography. (Hobby is used in the most generic way, but obsession is much closer to the truth.) I've taken more pictures of the Boy then I can count (10 or 20 gigs worth). If you want to see some of my work, I have a photoblog, feel free to take a look.

I feel pretty fortunate about both of those things. However I don't think I would of ever realized that both of these things were childhood dreams if I hadn't sat down and watched Randy Pausch's lecture.

Randy is a pretty interesting guy. A Professor at Carnegie Melon, and a leader in the Virtual Reality field. His lecture is called "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams". It's part of a lecture series called "Last Lecture". The concept behind this series is simply this, hypothetically if you knew you were dying what would your last lecture be?

However Randy has a little twist on this, you see he is actually dying of Pancreatic Cancer. His lived longer than the 6 months that this doctors gave him, but mostly from his courage.

This is one of those inspirational things that I think everyone should watch. The repised version of the lecture that he gave on Oprah is embedded below, his full length lecture is here: Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Good In = Good Out