The final grains of sand slipped through the hourglass, as we knew they must. Still the finality of it hit me hard. July 25, 2008. Randy Pausch has died. My friend and mentor are lost.

I worked with Randy, my Ph.D. advisor, at the University of Virginia between 1991 and 1997. He left for Carnegie Mellon shortly after I graduated. Note I did not say that I worked for Randy:  I worked with Randy. He always insisted that I say it that way. He was my colleague, not my boss. To this day I am always careful to speak the same way of my colleagues and the team of people that I manage.

As fate would have it, I had a demo scheduled during an executive keynote at the Microsoft Research 2008 Faculty summit on July 29, the Tuesday right after Randy died. Hundreds of faculty from around the world attend the summit every year. Many people who had known Randy would be in the audience, including the legendary Andries van Dam, Randy's undergraduate advisor. I couldn't let the opportunity pass without reflecting on this profound loss. I didn't practice my tribute and I didn't tell anyone I would do it. I just did it.

Randy talks about brick walls and overcoming them in The Last Lecture. It only occured to me just now, but my speech was in the Microsoft Executive Briefing Center, just down the hall from the pièce de résistance of the Microsoft art collection: a graffiti-covered chunk of The Berlin Wall - perhaps the biggest brick wall ever thrown up, in mankind's foolishness, to be torn down by those with greater ambitions.

My slot was only for 10 minutes. I had very little time to say anything substantive, and I still had to do my demo. I thought about it a lot. In the end what I most wanted to say again to Randy was "Thank You!" - thank you for being a great mentor. So I did exactly that, the image below projected on a massive screen twenty-five feet tall. It was literally the biggest Thank You that I could offer to Randy.

I also realized that I couldn't just leave it at that and plow right into my talk and technology demo. I first had to create a sense of closure, where of course the wound was still fresh and there was none. So this is what I said.

I think of Randy's life as an unfinished book. What is there is amazing and touched millions. I know the succeeding chapters would have been brilliant and fantastic. But the next page must remain forever blank.