Randy Pausch, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, virtual reality pioneer in the realm of virtual reality, human computer interaction, and design, died today. He was 47.

Aside from being a passionate advocate for the commingling of computer engineering and the arts — a topic that I hold dear — Randy movingly spoke about both living and dying well in his Last Lecture at CMU. His speech had in some ways pushed me on a slightly different course in life. The themes he talks about are the same ones that come up when we talk about how to succeed in our new world of openness. He will be remembered as a man who stood up and spoke directly to the inner desire in all of us to be better tomorrow than we are today.

There’s no better person from whom to hear it then Randy himself. The video is over an hour long, but it’s worth it.

We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand. If I don’t seem as depressed or as morose as I should be, sorry to disappoint you.

I finally made the permanent switch from a PC to a Mac — specifically, a sleek and juiced up MacBook Pro — after years of waffling over the convenience of compatibility (my previous 9-to-5 didn’t supply a laptop and required usage of Windows-only software) and the coolness of Apple’s experience.

Having drinks with a Mac-compatible friend one evening, I informed him of my imminent switch, and he warned me that Apple’s user experience doesn’t carry over to customer support. Perhaps suffering from the “That can’t happen to me!” syndrome, I wasn’t deterred and ordered up a shiny new laptop. What followed was a series of communication breakdowns, buck-passing, and ineptitude of a magnitude far greater than any I’ve ever witnessed with any product company.

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With all of the issues I’ve had on this blog — a horrendous hosting provider, a failed experiment with unproven blog software, family craziness, and a case of walking pneumonia, to list but a few — perhaps the reason I’ve been silent here as much as I have was because I have embarked on a career change. I’m happy to announce that just about four weeks ago, I joined the Experience Design team at Molecular.

A career move is not made without significant introspection. It was a pleasure to spend three years working with the bright folks at Miller Systems — many of whom I call friends — but over the six months before the move, I realized that my career interests were moving in a different direction, and after meeting several members of the Molecular team at various events I realized that they were the perfect fit for a number of reasons:

• I cherish the thought of collaborating with a group of folks who are like minded in their pursuit of designing total experiences that inspire.
• Molecular’s focus and industry leadership in emerging interactions — discovering patterns and themes in everyday use of technology, how those patterns evolve over time, parallels my personal and professional interests.
• To know that those i work with know that experience design intersects and intertwingles with art, sociology, psychology, literary studies, cinematography, and cultural anthropology as much as it does technology.

As a result, the future focus of this blog will be on the general themes found in this post. Blogging will be more frequent, often more topical, and occasionally (hopefully) more thought provoking than it has in the past.

In 2001, maleszyk.com began as a personal blog that chronicled my life as a single guy working to make a better internets. I talked about the women I dated, the movies I saw, the music I listened to, and what I had for dinner.

What I didn’t talk about, at least not at length, was what is commonly termed in our society as my “work.” Not because I didn’t enjoy it, but because I didn’t feel I was engaged enough to have anything worthwhile to say on a regular basis.

Over the last few years as a consultant in user experience design, I’ve been quietly but intently watching, listening, and thinking about the dramatic ways in which what I have been doing for a living for the past 11 years has been dramatically changing the world that we live in. The rise the move toward miscellaneous, the power of the long tail, and the increasing focus on findability in an information economy has changed the way we date, watch movies, listen to music, or decide what to have for dinner.

And here I am, standing in the middle of all of it, a member of the information cognoscenti. I hope to contribute my wisdom, if just a small part, to the crowd.