Some six months ago, doctors told Randy Pausch that he had about three months of good health left, until the pancreatic cancer in his body started to drain the life from him more aggressively. But this past weekend, Mr. Pausch, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and co-founder of its Entertainment Technology Center, sent an e-mail message to friends and family members saying that he is beating the odds and remains in relatively good health.

Mr. Pausch became an unexpected celebrity after he gave an inspirational “last lecture” at the university that hundreds of thousands of people have watched online.

The talk, called “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams,” was meant to recap the professor’s many achievements and provide some advice along the way. It did that, and it has also led Mr. Pausch to achieve a few more dreams, as he has documented on a blog that he has run since he received the cancer diagnosis. Here are a few of them:

Mr. Pausch wrote a book based on the talk, with the help of Jeffrey Zaslow of The Wall Street Journal, by dictating stories and ideas to Mr. Zaslow via cellphone during a daily bike ride. (The publisher, Hyperion Books, reportedly paid $6.7-million for the right to publish the book.) The book is expected to come out in early April.

He flew to Los Angeles to appear as an extra in the new Star Trek film, after getting an unexpected e-mail invitation to do so from the film’s director, J.J. Abrams. He said he was donating his acting pay to charity.

He traveled to Washington to try to persuade U.S. senators to pass legislation giving more money for research on pancreatic cancer.

“This won’t last forever (the doctors measure ‘winning’ this game in months, not years),” Mr. Pausch wrote in his e-mail message. “But I’ll take every day I can get!” —Jeffrey R. Young