I hadn’t heard of Randy Pausch until I came across this newspaper column by Michael Smerconish.

Shame on me: He has a best-selling book (ranked number four overall at Amazon as I type this) and his "last lecture" has been viewed millions of times over here on YouTube . That’s encouraging: We always hear about the dumbass 30-second video that gets millions of views, but this is a 76-minute lecture about achieving your childhood dreams.

Read the Smerconish column. Watch the video. If not today, then soon. You’ll be hard-pressed to find a better way to spend about an an hour and a half — and I type that statement without the slightest whiff of hyperbole.

JULY 25 UPDATE: USA Today reports that Randy died today.

Last year, I alerted you to 17 videos posted online by The New Yorker from their 2007 conference, "Stories From the Near Future." Well, they’ve done it again, so check out this page if you’d like to see more stories from the near future, including Malcolm Gladwell speaking on the challenge of hiring in the modern world, Steve Stoute talking with Kelefa Sanneh about marketing to a new generation of consumers or any other of the 22 videos available there.

"Luck is believing you’re lucky."
—Tennessee Williams

There have been a few additions to the federal CAN-SPAM act. If you’re involved in email marketing on any level, you’ll want to read this Campaign Monitor blog post to see what those changes are.

Takeaway for marketers: CAN-SPAM matters. Just ask MySpace, who paid $234 million for running afoul of it.

Ars Technica reports on a pretty weird situation involving Metallica. Seems the band held a listening party for critics, then decided it didn’t want the critics writing about what they heard. So, uh, why hold a listening party in the first place?