In the September 14, 2009 issue of Business Week, Stephen Baker and Arik Hesseldahl pen an interesting article about Lifelogs.  The bulk of the article is about Gordon Bell, a 75-year-old computer science legend who works for Microsoft Research in Silicon Valley, California (yes, the Gordon Bell of Digital Equipment Corp and Carnegie Mellon fame, and who as Chair of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Cross Agency Committee probably had a lot more to do with the creation of the internet than former Senator and Vice President Al Gore).  Gordon Bell is also the creator of Bell’s Law, a much more esoteric computer science law dealing with classes of computers than Moore’s Law, but which uses Moore’s Law relating to computational power of computer chips to explain how classes of computers are formed every ten years and how former classes of computers evolve and/or die.

For the past ten years, Gordon Bell has been creating a Lifelog of, what else, his life.  He wears a camera called a SenseCam which takes photos every few minutes or whenever the light changes indicating that the wearer has moved into a new area.  Bell also takes pictures himself and records his phone conversations.  He maps the area where he walks and scans all papers that he encounters that are worth saving.  He has recently co-authored a book with Jim Gemmell about his experiences entitled Total Recall:  How the e-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.  Bell argues that with the digitization of phone calls (cell phones), pictures (digital cameras, still and video), the internet, social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, that a lot of people are digitizing parts of their life, just not in a collective organized fashion.

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Randy Pausch, Computer Science Professor at Carnegie Mellon and author of The Last Lecture, died of complications from pancreatic cancer at the age of 47.  I didn’t know Randy, but like many, I was inspired by his story.  If you would like to listen to his last lecture, it’s available on YouTube.  If you want to read his book, it’s available at Amazon.com or other bookstores.  My blog review is at http://wallyboston.com/2008/07/09/the-last-lecture/.

Randy expressed no regrets professionally for his terminal diagnosis at such an early age.  He said that he had accomplished everything that he set out to accomplish other than playing professional football in the NFL.  His only personal regret was that he would miss growing old with his wife and children and he did the book and lecture for them.  Randy, you were right; there are thousands of people like you.  We just need more of them to stand up, like you did.  My life is richer for hearing your story.  It’s my understanding that on Tuesday night (7/29) Diane Sawyer will do a story on ABC’s Primetime celebrating your life.  I’ll be sure to tune in.

At the Chronicle’s Executive Leadership Forum, Jeffrey Zaslow spoke about Randy Pausch the Carnegie Mellon professor who was the subject of a Wall Street Journal column last fall.  Zaslow, a Carnegie Mellon alum and reporter for the WSJ, heard about Pausch’s lecture and received permission from his editor to cover it.  At the last minute, he decided to video some of the lecture and post it on the Journal’s website before the article was published.  In true Web 2.0 fashion, the video link was emailed, posted on YouTube and over 30 million people have seen it.

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