Saturday night – Yom kippur

Today was Yom Kippur and I spent it quietly here at home. I decided not to go to shul (temple) . Last night and last week were fine.. but I felt better about being by myself. I did do the traditional Fast from last night. The idea of the fast is to clear you mind of worldly things. So you can concentrate on more spiritual things… like how hungry you are. I’ve fasted every Yom Kippur since I was little.. but I never remember it being as easy as today. I’ve really no been eating that much the last month or so anyway.. I usually get pretty light headed, spacey and cranky after about 4 hours without food.. today I barely felt it. I think I know have such a different scale of pain that this didn’t even register. I guess that’s a good thing…

Not much else really happened today… Gabe and his friends hd camped out on the tramp.. again.. I think they got pretty wet from the dew.. but they slept late enough that the sun dried them before they woke.

Gabe got out the spray cans again and ended up being the boy with the golden toe.

Around 4ish Diane and I took a short walk.. As we were coming back to the house, we saw Gabe and a bunch of kids coming down the road towards us. From the that distance it was hard to tell that Sam wasn’t with them. It’s kind of nice when that happens.

Around 7 a bunch of friends came over to help us replenish the SamStones stock. We move through them so quickly now. Check out the SamStones.Org map to see the large number of Stones getting out there.. Jen estimates we’re over 2000. I get many notes of them being placed and/or found every day now.

A picture Avery had that Sam gave to her

As folks started to disperse tonight, a few of us started watching an amazing thing on YouTube. All this week I’d heard of a moving ‘Last Lecture’ which was given last week by Prof. Randy Paush a 46 year old professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) where I did my grad work. Randy is a pioneer in Virtual Reality and is the creator of Alice.. the game authoring tool used by many universities including my buddies Anne and Hpe’s program at Champlain. Randy’s been diagnosed with an advanced and incurable form of pancreatic cancer. Evidently he has only a few weeks left to live. / He chose to give one last university lecture on ‘Achieving your dreams’ . I’ve received 6 emails from friends with links to videos of the lecture. It was covered in the Wall Street Journal. SlashDot, ComputerWorld. The CMU press. Etc. I found the lectures on YouTube During the hour, Randy talks about growing u. his parents, his mentors and his students and his work. I was interested in the latter because Randy’s been a pioneer in the use of gaming and virtual world technology for education.. which is the field I’m entering for my sabbatical. He has some great observations on making your dreams come true. I found it really inspirational.. and one of the most amazing examples of grace under pressure I’ve seen . It’s really worth watching if you have the time..

Here’s an edited version of the highlights of the talk.

Here are the links to the unedited segments on YouTube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HqdnjgkExY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_5cTuXrpNI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PYIAbIlQ8o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J18CnoQbizA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BC-v8A2_biM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhHNBqm8xtE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8azl1hqUaM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_VcjTG4xh4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5H5R2hC45o

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnD7i9XHL7k