My PhD advisor Randy Pausch continues to be on my mind a lot this week. His book "The Last Lecture" came out last Tuesday. It's already the #1 bestseller on Amazon. I was a bit tardy ordering my copy, but it's supposed to arrive on Thursday. I am very much looking forward to it.

In the meantime some fond memories of the time I spent working with Randy keep cropping up.

An exciting time I remember is when Randy's original research group at the University of Virginia was right on the cusp of getting big time funding. For a long time we had been operating in what Randy always called the "eat what you kill" model of research funding, where we had to be content with devouring the various small fry we could catch when it came to dollars to fund our research.

But Randy had made some connections with DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and from DARPA the real dollars flowed to support big, ambitious research efforts. Just the right Call for Proposals was out. Randy had schmoozed the principal decision maker and convinced him that he had the killer research project that would light the world on fire.

This project ultimately became Alice. I remember some students expressing concern that having funding from the Defense Department might torque the direction of the research in an undesirable way. Just to make the point, I remember Randy had one of the students design up a pink tank that shot out bunnies, or something cute like that.  Alice was going to stay fun and playful.

But the big problem remained. The proposal was due the next day. It was subject to peer review so something just thrown together was not going to get the good reviews necessary for DARPA to fund it.

This proposal was about the big bucks. One of the students calculated that we could use the money to buy a fresh pizza once every five minutes for years on end.  Randy took note of this and zipped a quick email to the entire research group to get everyone excited about working on the proposal: IF WE PULL THIS OFF, WE'LL EAT LIKE KINGS!

Somehow I had become known as "the writing machine" -- the best writer in Randy's research group. So Randy and I spent a long night where Randy emailed me a steady stream of points to raise in each paragraph. My job was to "turn them into real text" as fast as I could. Some of the other senior students were there as well, helping Randy to strategize the points while I pounded away to produce "the real text."

But we still had a big problem. We needed to deliver a paper copy of the proposal to the office in Washington, D.C. We were way past the FedEx deadline of 4pm, and indeed wrapping up the proposal went well into the early afternoon of the deadline day. But Randy had a solution for this as well. One of his students rode a motorcycle, and off he raced to DC with the proposal in hand. He burst into the DARPA office less than 5 minutes before the deadline and slapped it on the desk.

We had pulled it off. The proposal was accepted. We got the funding. Randy's research group had officially hit the big time. We ate like kings.