Carnegie Mellon Professor Randy Pausch, who was dying from pancreatic cancer, gave his last lecture at the university Sept. 18, 2007, before a packed McConomy Auditorium. In his moving talk, “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” Pausch talked about his lessons learned and gave advice to students on how to achieve their own career and personal goals. For more, visit www.cmu.edu/randyslecture.“Journeys” are special University Lectures in which Carnegie Mellon faculty members share their reflections on their journeys — the everyday actions, decisions, challenges and joys that make a life. (more…)

In today’s day and age we are all looking to be successful somehow. Some of us play the lottery hoping to win millions of dollars. Others study toward becoming one of the trifecta of educational success: doctor, engineer or lawyer. And some of us break the law and try to cheat the system making a quick buck here and there.

How to become successful in life is something that I ponder about a lot. Being a manager of 27 employees it’s my job to motivate and support people in their career and life goals. In doing so I always look for fun team building activities to do and I look for great videos to watch in team meetings.

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This might not be big news to most but, this being the first game I work on that wasn’t canceled/postponed, I’m totally psyched! Yup, my first ever designed game to see a public release, Midnight Pool for Wii Ware, is coming soon to a Wii near you!

The team working on this really did put a lot of effort in it and we believe we really did make the best pool game out there available on any console. I’m really happy that the game is finally out and I can’t wait to pick-up a Wii so that I can show it off to all my friends

Here’s a snippet from the press release:

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I wanted to bring another amazing site to your attention. The site is TED.com.

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives.

This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks from their archive are now available, with more added each week. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted. Like the one below. If you believe in any humanitarian causes or love entertainment and technology this site is a must see.

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I haven’t played Magic the Gathering with “real cards” in years. In fact, I had taken apart all of my decks and put my more valuable cards in binders and the less valuable ones in boxes. They would have very likely stayed that way if I didn’t stumble upon 2 co-workers playing on their lunch break one fateful day!Fond memories of casting dragons and tapping assassins came flooding in! I asked if they would kindly include me in on their next game and they gladly accepted, but not without some hesitation. I had confessed that I had not played in years and they were worried that my ancient cards might not hold-up to their newer ones. One of them even offered to let me play with a pre-contructed deck until I got myself some new cards. I gracefully declined of course… (more…)

I used to be a huge MMA (mixed-martial arts) fan. I’ve watched all of the original UFCs (Ultimate Fighting Championship) when Royce Gracie was king! I loved the structure back then: Eight fighters face off in one-on-one fights within a single 1 day tournament until only one person is left. It was exciting and romantic and felt more like a video game than Boxing or even WWE (then WWF) did.

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A co-worker of mine (we’ll call him Coyote) and I had a friendly discussion the other day about multi-player games. I was arguing that any game can be “fun” and “at least playable” if you played it in multi-player with friends as long as there weren’t any negative outside factors (such as lag, broken controller, sun in your eyes, etc..). We decided to put this theory to the test.

What better way to prove any game could be fun than to pick a game that was on almost every “worst games of all time” list ever written? So what lucky game did we choose? Why Daikatana of course! Haven’t heard of it? A short history is perhaps in order.

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A warning to all who are reading this: This post is intended for all those people who’ve seen the Dark Knight on a regular theater screen (or smaller) and want to know what they might have missed.

In case you didn’t know, the Dark Knight is the first major motion picture shot partially with IMAX cameras. The end result is that some scenes are gorgeous to look at! The term “HD theater”probably describes the IMAX experience best!

One last spoiler warning, the following is a short list of scenes that were shot with an IMAX camera. If you haven’t seen the Dark Knight then read no further as some major plot points are mentioned. You’ve been warned.

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A couple of weeks ago I was contacted by a representative of the website OsamaLoves.com. The aim of the site is to show that not all Osama’s are terrorists hell-bent on seeing the end of all Americans and apple pie. Their aim is to collect the pictures of 500 Osama’s holding up a cue card explaining what they love! They also plan on making a documentary with the same purpose.

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When applying to a job today one of the scariest procedures is the background check or the check for security clearance. You and I know that you are innocent of anything and you are definitely not a criminal. However, in today’s market employers want to be sure that they are not only hiring the best candidate for the job, they are hiring someone who has a clean slate and are heaven bound. Employers are also beginning to search for you via Google.com searches, Facebook.com and linkedin.com. So, have you ever wanted to get an anonymous tip on how the company of your dreams really is from the inside?

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