RIP Randy Rhoads

Today is the 26th anniversary of the death of Randy Rhoads. What better way to remember him than an 8 minute guitar solo from the Quiet Riot days? You’ll find a lot of familiar pieces in this solo. Enjoy – and RIP Randy.

I also have pictures of the grave site from a trip I took back in 2005. You can find a lot more at the Diary of an Axeman web site – the definitive site on the net for Randy Rhoads “stuff”.

Dr. Randy Pausch Farewell Lecture at Carnegie Mellon University

Jonna recorded an episode of Oprah in which Dr. Pausch, a Computer Science professor suffering from terminal pancreatic cancer, gives his “farewell lecture”, apparently an exercise at the university where you give a lecture acting as if it was your last. In this case it is. Dr. Pausch provides an extremely inspirational message.

This video is basically a series of excerpts, but inspiring nonetheless.

The university has a page where you can order the lecture on DVD. You can also visit Dr. Pausch’s personal site.

Update 10/29/2007

Tom the Architect points to what looks like the full session from his del.icio.us links.

Video: How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too)

Since getting a 80G iPod about a month ago two weeks ago, I’ve been really getting into watching the Google Tech Talks on Google Video. I recently watched How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People (And You Can Too), a lecture given by Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman from the Subversion team (now both Google employees) that summarizes a lot of information in Karl Fogels book Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project.

If you haven’t had time to pick up and read Karls book, this video would be a good primer to some of the concepts in it and could very well motivate you to pick it up. Its an excellent book and one that I thoroughly enjoyed reading.