I sometimes look back and think maybe I should have chosen the other way. I KNOW! It was me who made the choice, and I have no complaint about the way I am on right now.

In fact, from the first moment, or even before that, I knew that I would be sorry for the other way, whatever I’d chosen.

OK, some of you might think that “the other way” was staying at S* company, and “the way I am on” is graduate course. WRONG and right in part. No hard feelings, but I’ve never regreted leaving S* company. (yeah..I am little bit sorry whenever I have to pay my bills)

Those “ways” are Computer Science vs. Cognitive Science that I wanted to study in the graduate school. (to be fair, I did want to study business or marketing specifically, but I somehow thought that I would get a chance for them later in my life.) Well, as I often write in my essays for the CS jobs, computers have been a part of my life since I was a little boy. In college, even though I could freely chosen my major among 4 different majors, I did not hesitate to choose CS as my major.

Cognitive Science. About two years ago, taking the first Cognitive Science course at undergraduate school, I realised that my ultimate interst lies in the human. My huge interst in the Psycology was due to the fact that I could understand HUMAN, you and me. Cognitive science had different way to get to the same goal. It tries to understand the mechanisms of how we think or feel. I just LOVE this subject.

Anyway, last year, I had to make a very tough choice, but I made it. CS was again my major in graduate school. As I thought it would be, now I think about what it would be like if I’d choosed the different one. But I know that if I had chose Cognitive Science, I would think about how much I love CS whenever I pass the engineering building. This makes me feel much better.

As I get older, I think I got better at handling these kind of things I have to confront in life. I understand that I made a choice and it is possible that the other way I could have been looks cooler. (after all, that’s why it is my “the other way”!) Unless I think I made a terrible mistake, now I take these feelings much cooler, since it’s just natural. That is one thing (hopely among other things) I got better at as I got older.

This morning while I was reading news, I found a very interesting one. It was about a *last lecture* by a professor Randy Pausch from CMU. I thought at first that he was retiring. But it was not the case. He was diagnosed with the cancer. He had only a few months left. That was why he had his last lecture.

Last lecture sounded a little bit depressing. I mean, it sounded too sad. But if the news of the lecture appeared even on a Korean newspaper, I thought there must be something. And it’s really was.

He didn’t look sad at all. He was thankful for being health at the moment, and for the people he’s been with. He was funny, and passionate even though he has less than 6 months left.

I dare to recommend this lecture to you, especially if you think you are having a hard time. Who could beat a dying man when he is only 47 years old?

I wish all the best for the professor Randy Pausch.

I could not find the full length video on the youtube, so I leave the link from the google video here, or you can watch the video at the bottom of this post.

Dying 47-Year-Old Professor Gives Exuberant ‘Last Lecture’

or you can watch the edited version of the video by WSJ.

Dying Professor’s Last Lecture

I usually don’t like to install a OS that’s just released, but I could not stop myself upgrading to the 7.10. (probably since I had tons of things to read)

Upgrading was quite easy. I had Ubuntu 7.04 Edgy installed(in fact, upgraded from Dapper), and just followed the official guide. (Upgrading to Ubuntu 7.10)  But, after the reboot after the first upgrade, I had to upgrade again for my other packages(applications & libraries).

But what really sucked was that it took me more than 9 hours to finish the upgrade completely. And I could not leave the machine alone since I had to hit Enter sometimes (at my second upgrade).

But the quality of the new system is pretty great. My ATI video card works just fine with the restricted driver(which Ubuntu just took care of), and I like the new GNOME and everything.

It did cost me sometime/trouble to locate my Windows partitions since the device name has been changed to  /dev/sdb1 from /dev/hdc1. (”fdisk -l” will let you see the partitions on your disks. And fix /etc/fstab to apply the change.)

Advatage: Thanks to the new GNOME, overall GUI got much better. I cannot abandon Window(All the apps I need to use), but this one is enough to use most of the time.