Do I want one? No. Not at all. Until Apple offers me something at least comprable to competing tablet PCs running Android or Windows 7 Tablet edition, I won’t even consider it.

Unless…

Apple offered Live TV.

I was thinking about this the other day while running errands when I wished I could be watching Butler in the Final Four. How great would it be if you could get something like FLO TV streamed to your iPad or iPhone. Or even better, your cable or Satellite TV offered streaming service for all their channels through a native app. I would probably pay extra each month on my Comcast bill if they offered that.

I know that Sling has an app that let’s you watch live TV from your sling box, but that requires a piece of hardware hooked up to a dedicated cable/sat box. If anyone else wants to watch TV at home while you’re on the road, someone is going to be dissappointed.

Seriously, how could Apple or broadband operators go wrong? A LIVE TV app seems like a killer app to me!

Just a thought.

(Oh yeah, I still don’t like that iPhads don’t have Flash too!)

In response to a question I asked about CES, my friend Erik responded:

@ Jason: I’m actually surprised 3-D has taken so long to go anywhere. The technology has been around forever… and it’s never been very successful. The weird thing is I don’t know why…I think people want to see it utilized well, but it just hasn’t effectively been executed ever in a way that people have taken to it. I remember as a kid thinking it was cool just looking through those cellophane red/blue glasses and seeing figures pop out. And then there was that “Virtual Reality” gaming product that never took off. I think people have been interested, but it’s just poorly executed or too expensive. You would think after decades 3-D would have found its niche by now. Avatar is probably the most successful venture I’ve seen to date… and it’s a movie not a product you would go buy.

First… I totally agree. WTF 3D? Ever since Lawnmower Man, NO, ever since TRON we have been waiting to immerse ourselves in a world better than our own. Now I know there is a big difference between Virtual Reality and 3D, but we aren’t being entertained by either at the moment so what does it matter?

I think the biggest problem with 3D is that content producers don’t know how to utilize it best. I find that when movie producers make a 3D movie, they have to add extra “features” for the 3D crowd just because they are watching it in 3D. It’s exactly like painting a turd gold. The script sucks but “that’s ok because we’re going to add 3D elements and the audience will ooh and ahh, hem and haw! Let’s send Brendan Fraser on a ridiculous mining-cart roller coaster because we have 3D! Let’s randomly throw shit at the camera just because it’s 3D!”

I have yet to see Avatar. I was excited to see it before it was released, and I’m still excited to go see it. I will see it eventually, there’s no rush. I’m waiting for the hype and the larpers to go away, and a babysitter. But I’m really afraid they added stuff just because it’s 3D. However, James Cameron is a half-decent director and I trust he’ll entertain me. If he added “fun things” just for those goofy 3D glasses, I’ll never see another one of his movies again.

I feel 3D is an enhancement, not a primary feature. If you go to a movie just because it’s 3D, you’re going for the wrong reason!

I think the most exciting thing to happen in 3D happened in the 80s: Michael Jackson’s Captain EO at DisneyLand. THAT was SO cool. I was also 10 years old and I still believed in Santa and Leprechauns. And yes, it threw a lot of stuff at the camera, but since it WAS a novelty, it was totally okay. The fact that a lot of producers are still using the same antics 24 years later is annoying.

I think the most exciting thing about 3D in the past year didn’t belong to James Cameron. It belonged to Pixar. The re-release of Toy Story 1 & 2 in 3D is a pretty big bet in the technology. The reason being that Toy Story was never written, produced or designed for 3D in the first place. The fact that they “enhanced” an original movie by re-rendering it with a 3D camera instead of the original 2D is actually very compelling. They took something good, made it better. It wasn’t a case of “so we have this 3D thing we can do…”

Where do I see 3D headed? Well until we can grasp the fact that just because we CAN utilize a Z-axis that it doesn’t mean that every producer needs to throw shit at the camera for “surprise” elements. We, as an audience, need to let producers know that we’re over the whole “Ak! Look out!” effect. Just make a good movie, and we’ll go watch it. I suspect this is what James Cameron has done with Avatar (I’ll find out in the very near future).

On the technology side, we have so many hurdles left to jump: no more 3D-glasses, holographic or multi-layered displays, and improved virtual reality goggles are all foreseeable technologies that we’ll most likely see in our lifetime. True virtual reality environments, the ones you plugin to another world while your body lays there…like Avatar, Tron, Matrix, Minority Report, Total Recall, etc, we may be centuries away.

And for that world, which we are preparing the foundation for right now, I’d like to apologize to my great-great grandkids in advance.

To say the last two months have been difficult would be an understatement. But I survived.

In November, an employee who had also become a great friend was hospitalized. He went into a coma and never came out of it. A week later he passed away. Jim was two weeks older than me. His passing really made me put my own life into perspective. Attending his funeral and meeting his parents was more difficult and more emotional than I ever could have imagined. It was a beautiful service, and a great tribute.

Last week I had to lay-off my entire department. I know these guys are pros and will quickly rebound, but we formed a very close-knit team. We were working on some great projects that may never be realized and that also kills me. But mostly, we won’t be working together anymore and I really miss that.

Last weekend, someone broke into my car in my driveway and stole $100 cash. Sure we could have used the cash, but losing it isn’t that big of a deal. What is upsetting is how violated I feel that someone broke into my car on my property. There is a sense of paranoia that occurs after these types events. Now I’m taking extra precautions to make sure my family is safe at night.

And finally, last night my sweet Grandmother passed away. She was my last living grandparent. One of the most loving and kind-hearted persons I have ever known. To her, family was everything. The most difficult part was being so far away from her during her last hours. But I did have the opportunity to call her and say goodbye. I was amazed at how cognizant and aware she was of what was happening to her. She knew her time had come and had gathered her family. She was able to call all her Grandchildren who lived far from home. How amazing.

As I sit here and think about the tragedy and life-changes that have occurred in the past two months, I find myself uncharacteristically in a sound state of mind. It would be too easy to go into a deep depression. It would be too easy to find blame and faults in the world. It would be too easy to be upset that these events happened around Thanksgiving and Christmastime…times when everything should be right and everyone be happy. Those types of emotions would be too easy to have.

I am very sad about what has happened, but I also have a full heart and realize these events had to happen. There is a time when all good things come to an end. I understand that now. I know my life wasn’t the only one impacted. It seems I had a series of events happen to me, but truth is these events happened to a lot of others too. I am grateful they occurred how and when they did. I’m grateful they happened in a short amount of time and I will be able to mourn briefly and then move on with building a better life.

But… please God and whatever karmic energy that surrounds me, no more life changes for a while, OK? Let me catch my breath before the next round.

Jim’s death was a tragedy. I am grateful I knew him. He was a generous soul, helping out with organizations like Helping Hands. His passing around Thanksgiving time might seem inconvenient, but if it was his time to go I’m glad he did it at a time when we reflect on being grateful and helping others. Now, each Thanksgiving I’ll reflect back on the few months that I knew Jim as a friend, and remind myself that volunteering my time is one of the best ways that I can show my gratitude. Thank you Jim.

Losing my entire team at DataNet Pro was very sorrowful. But it was something that had to be done. We took a gamble and tried marketing financial products in a down economy using a bootstrapped budget. It didn’t pay off. It is unfortunate, and the lay-off event seems untimely, but I’m grateful we even had the chance of working together. I had learned so much from each of my staff, in both the business world and life lessons, that I can’t even imagine what the past 9+ months would have been without them. The theme of this holiday season this year is to focus on what matters most in life. Without knowing my team and knowing what they are going through, I don’t know if I would have picked up on that. And what a remarkable people that my wife, my kids and I all have as friends and second family. Thank you to Ryan, Tyler, Lulu, Pete, Johanna, Mark, Sergei and Jim. You all inspire me!

Losing my Grandma is the saddest event of them all, but how grateful and proud I am to be part of her family. Her life, her love, and her family is an amazing legacy to be retold by generations. I know I’ll be passing down the love and values that she instilled in my Mom, and my mom instilled in me. I lived just a couple of miles from Grandma (and so did all my cousins). We were always together. It may seem that having a loved one pass at Christmas time is tragic, but in my eyes I can’t think of a more fitting and better time for Grandma to pass. This was the time of year she loved. This is the time of year we will all remember her.

For 4-5 weeks of every year her house was full of laughter of kids and adults at play, delicious smells from her cooking of stacks and stacks of sugar cookies, sounds of the door chimes from the coming and going of all the grandkids, puddles of melting snow from the boots on her landing, warmth of a fire crackling in her wood burning stove, the sights of two, sometimes three tables spread with goodies for the taking, and the love that comes from knowing everyone who walked in the door was welcomed in that house. I know that all kids think their grandparent’s are magic, but my Grandma especially was.

Merry Christmas Grandma. We love you.

Sometimes, you have to jump at opportunities even if it means you personally won’t reap the benefits. If you don’t you may never see your vision come to light. This year I lucked into such an opportunity. I had hired a very talented team of SEO’s and developers to build a network of websites for my employer. While we did pretty good at building the traditional sites that my company was familiar with, we were missing our killer app. We had nothing that set us apart from the many, many competitive sites in our industry. The main challenge we faced was that we didn’t have a core community website that we could use to leverage trust and authority from the search engines. This authority site had to be unique, and it couldn’t just be another blog, forum, or directory. Those are all done and dated already. We needed a different type of site. As I’ve faced this exact challenge in the past with many different clients, it’s no surprise I already had an idea for the type of site we’d need that would bring the power and authority to get the rankings we were after. Now was the time to build it, even if it means that I’d be giving my prized idea to my company as intellectual property. But, that’s part of why they hired me, to bring all my ideas that can benefit us directly and put them on the table.

I did some research and discovered it would cost us almost six figures to purchase the licensing and custom development for the type of site that I wanted to build. So I talked it over with my developers and did a quick feasibility analysis. This could be done! I told my team that this was a second priority to any other projects they were assigned. I have some brilliant developers. They were able to conquer all my projects ahead of schedule, beating my most unrealistic expectations for deadlines. They built facebook app after facebook app, all the top priority sites in queue, and a lot of single one-off projects from me and from corporate. I have worked with a lot of great developers in the past, but these two have truly shown me they are two of the best. So with a lot of projects cleared off the board, and an initiative to focus only on projects that would benefit us in SEO, I gave the guys a greenlight to work full-time on the project.

This week we are ready to launch the main project, and it’s supporting sister sites, to the public as beta. I’ll be posting about it soon as an official announcement. Stay tuned!

BTW – As much as I honor my development team in this post, I can’t say enough about the fantastic marketers that I have that make up the rest of my team! They too are brilliant, motivated, and bring a very unique set of skills and talents that contributes to the unique nature of the team. Some of our projects haven’t panned out exactly like planned, but it isn’t because of a lack of trying or lack of talent. The industry we are in is truly a bitch and very competitive. But, with the launch of our new project, I expect some great things from the result of an entire-team marketing effort in a very short amount of time. So, as before, stay tuned!

You see, I’d watch in agony each week as the kids who won would run through Toys-R-Us and make the same mistakes over and over. They’d all do the same thing: with huge eyes, they’d frantic their shopping cart through the store filling it with things like bikes, skateboards, basketballs, huge stuffed animals, radio control cars, and other huge items. I swear one time a kid tried to stick a trampoline in his shopping cart. Watching these kids would frustrate me because they were doing it wrong! They get to keep everything they could squeeze into one cart. If only they had my strategy, they could have gotten all those toys and more. My plan was pretty simple to. If I were on the show, I’d run straight to the baseball cards and fill the cart until it was overflowing. I could then maximize the space in my shopping cart with some of the smallest, yet highest valued items in the store.  I wouldn’t need to run all the many aisles, I could maximize my full 5 minutes in a single spot. After I took home my loot, I’d open all the packs, sort them out, create a few sets, and resell those sets plus the highest valued singles back to my local baseball card dealers (there were many in the 80’s and early 90’s). With the money, I’d return back to Toys-R-Us and get the toys I wanted and still have a lot of money left over.

As my friends know, I’ve always been a entrepreneur geek. Sure I enjoyed making money, but what I enjoyed most was optimizing a little-known process (which could also be thought of as exploiting a loophole or exploiting the system). My career choices are pretty much par for the course from my humble beginnings. As a Search Engine Optimizer and Social Marketer, I look for ways to “optimize” the experience for my clients. I make their website more suitable for success within search engines and social networks. Back 3 to 5 years ago, I was simply exploiting holes in Google’s algorithm. These days I play their game, but still have many opportunities to leverage social networks like Twitter, reddit, StumbleUpon, and Facebook in the process.

I enjoy it. It’s fun to be able to make changes and see how it affects the traffic coming into the site. I’ve been on the tipping point for a few months with one of my sites, and I think we are about to release a product (another website) that will soon push it over the edge and give me the results I’ve been looking for for so long. One downside to this business is that it can be entirely frustrating to not get the results you were hoping for as soon as you want. But when you do achieve success, it is very rewarding. So I’m hoping this little extra “oomph” that my team has been working on for the past 2 months will really jump start something good. We’ll see what happens. But our shopping cart is full and we are more than ready!

I have to agree 100% with Andy Beal’s comments:

He owes his fans, the media, and his sponsors an explanation.Yes, he does!

They invested their time, their money, their emotional commitment to Woods. He sold them a brand and now he’s not living up to it. Just like any other “product” its customers deserve to know why it’s not “working” the way it has for the past decade or more.

Cold? Sure! And Woods can continue to hold onto his privacy if he so chooses–as Bobby Brown would say, that’s his “perogative!” But, at some point he needs to decide what’s more important, Tiger Woods the person, or Tiger Woods the brand.

Because Tiger Woods the brand is in a lot of trouble at this point.

With OTHER huge brands riding the Tiger name: Gatorade, G2, Nike, Buick, Gillette, EA Sports, and more. All of these brands will need to rethink their sponsorships and face-time with Tiger as a spokesperson if Tiger continues to dodge the press.

I sure hope Tiger considers his reputation and decides to be a bit more vocal about the incident.

Scatterbrain random updates to hold you over:

• Summer in Florida was just another Summer In Florida. No storms yet, so it’s been a pretty calm and HOT year.
• I have a few queued posts that I’ve started that I hope to post soon. I also have a few queued up in my head that have yet to be written.
• Lately I’ve been focusing on Facebook marketing. This is a whole new world to me. Not only is it exciting because so much is possible, it is also a very large opportunity if done right. I started in Email. I went to Search. Dabbled in Social. But it’s Facebook that has the potential to be bigger then all the others combined. This is truly a new frontier.
• I’m not running nearly as much as I hoped. Busy being a dad, a husband, a co-worker, an employee, a manager, and a marketer. But I’ve scheduled some time for myself in the immediate future.
• I hope to write more about Facebook advertising. I’ll post what I can. But I’m not a guru. This is a learning experience for me too, so don’t expect anything earth shattering.

Now I always enjoy a good tradeshow, but I really enjoy them when I’m about to launch a new product. It seems that when I learn things with an idea of how I’m going to apply them to a current project, they seem to make a stronger impact. After all, what is knowledge without application and execution? My company will be launching this ambitious project later this summer, and I hope that the timing of SMX and the opportunities I know it will present, will help benefit our product launch.

Oh, and another thing, I friggin LOVE the city of Seattle. It is easily my favorite city in the states. I especially love the emerald city during this time of year, check out this weather! I’m also a huge Mariners fan. They happen to be playing a series while I’m there, but as much of a fan I am, I opted not to go to a game because that’s not the purpose of this trip. I’d hate to miss out on networking opportunities while I was doing the seventh inning stretch.

It sure beats dreaming about the things I normally dream about!

I’m sitting on my sofa. Laptop on my lap. After a days of extreme highs and lows, thinking about how I perceive the world, and how much the world has shaped me.

The highs I experienced today were manic. No caffeine rush, no sugar, and I don’t take prescriptions. These highs were natural, but there were no triggers that I recall to create them.

That’s when my wife said: “I wonder if you’re bipolar?”

Wait, what?

Never in my life has this been a question. I’ve never been hyper or suffered attention deficit issues. I have had boughts of situational depression, and know a good funk or two, but internally I never perceived myself as being anything short of mentally strong.

So I immediately dismissed my wifes suggestive reasoning. But, my subconsious never let go of her words.

“Bipolar?”
“HA! No way! Never! That’s genetic, not conditional.”
“Are you sure?”
“Hmm… now that I think about it….”

Now before you or I get ahead of myself and the rest of this post, I’m not about to go off and self diagnose any possible ailment based on a single observation. I have plenty of reasonable doubt that I would not meet the criterion for a diagnosis. Or even come close. But I will entertain the thought of a deep and thorough internal self evaluation. It’s great therapy to give yourself a reality check every once in a while.

Here’s where it gets interesting. I’ve been married to a bi-polar sufferer for 8 years now. The observations made of how she handles, diffuses, and manages anxieties and stresses have been spectacular. The highs and states of elation were also spectacular. It’s the violent swings in the middle that can be horrifying. This medical condition is very real regardless what recent controversies may suggest.

Somehow I ended up in marketing. But if dollars wouldn’t have influenced me, I would have easily ended up in the fields of sociology or anthropology. I’m fascinated by human interaction, cultural influence, religion impact, and the conditioning that occurs with individuals. I strongly believe that each persons unique identity isn’t really his/her identity and it really isn’t all that unique. It’s the result of the culmination of thousands upon thousands of influences being applied to that person over time. I think being in marketing isn’t too far of a stretch in a sense, as it’s all about finding wasy to influence certain demographics to take a certain action (buy something, consume something, interact with something). Most people herd in the same direction, you just need to find their triggers.

It is with this same fundamental core that I strongly believe that environment can create certain emotional imbalances and possible dysfunctions as well.

It is with this core that I feel that even though I’m a mentally stable, logic processing, emotionally level individual, that I can still be capable of firing internal and external indicators that I may be bipolar. I’m not, but after living with a diagnosed bipolar and intimately observing behavior during manic episodes for 24, 48, sometimes 72 hours at a time, that I’m not at all surprised that I too can mimic some of these behaviors. Unintentionally. Subconsciously.

Today, my logic and processing were all still on cue. But my behavior and my energy were visibly manic to an outside observer. Internally, in addition being elated, even my heart rate was up. I was truly on cloud 9! And this is the only possibility I can have for describing it (unless I have a tumor. That’s always what happens on House at least).

I was suffering shadow syndrome symptoms. Fascinating!

I call it the “For Me Moment”. Or vice versa “Moment For Me”. Either way, it works.

A For Me Moment is when the karmic universe pays back its dividends. It’s when Life, the universe, God, protective angels, or whatever you feel is watching over you, sends you a confirmation. A wink. A nod. An exploding fist bump.

For example, I went to the bar with my brother-in-law and his wife while they were in town visiting. I was the designated driver and there for the wings. I was just chillin’ and enjoying hanging out with my relatives. That’s when a group of girls, attractive ones too, bought me a drink. That, my friends, was a For Me Moment. Now I’m a married man and wouldn’t act on anything, but I totally appreciated the gesture. I passed on the drink to my bro-in-law, made sure to give them thanks and cheers, and explained I was DD and we were getting ready to go. Then we left and I was grinning the entire way back.

I’ll admit, most For Me Moments usually involve (attractive) members of the opposite sex. It can be as simple as a someone doing a double take when they see you, with obvious signs of showing attraction. It could be a mutual friend telling you that someone thinks you are cute. A moment can be simple eye contact with a sexy girl at the city pool. It can be the bikini top that gets adjusted when she exits the water, giving you a sneak peek just because you happen to be looking that way. You’re the only one who saw, but she sees you and smiles while quickly fixing the wardrobe malfunction. You nod or wink back. “Thanks for the freebie, ma’am.” Yes, that’s a moment that was meant just for you! (This one happened to be my wife, which made it even better!)

Moments For Me don’t always have to be about attraction. For example, the other day I was dead tired. I had been up all night with my sick daughter. I left work early to go home to what I assumed was going to be more stress in helping manage the house and kids. I wasn’t looking forward to it all. Once I arrived home, my wife said without being prompted “Katie’s asleep, and Joey and I are going to the store. Why don’t you take a nap?” That moment was totally for me. I laid my head on my pillow with a big grin, and fell asleep to one of the best naps I’ve had in years (yes, years)!

A simple, unsolicited, accolade or “job well done” from a co-worker or employer is a moment. Finding unexpected cash in your wallet or sock drawer can be a moment. Getting a restaurant tab adjusted to free or significant discount without expecting it (even if it was to correct an error they may have made), can be a moment. Or simply hitting all green lights on a road that is notorious for stopping you at every light can be a great moment.

Simply put, a For Me Moment can be anything that happens outside of the norm’ that lets you know things are going to be just fine!

(And for the record, you can say For Me Moment or Moment For Me, or some other variation that works for you. Just don’t abbreviate it because that would be 2/3 gay).

I noticed that over the past few months we’ve been getting more serious in our relationship. I’ve been writing about soul-finding and reflections and goals and all that shit. I apologize profusely.

Looking back over the past 5 years since we’ve been courting, I realized that I went from a fun and energetic producer of semi-decent content, to a boring and dull lump of lazy who offers less excitement than a dose of Dramamine.

Call it an identity crisis or whatever. It is still no excuse for taking the fun out of our relationship. Hell, we started this journey together as a joke, so when the hell did we get all serious?

Seriously?

Blog, we had good times together, you and me. Remember the time poked fun at Facebook and all the people that took myspace too seriously? Or that we gave unsolicited professional advice to Mark Cuban, Kevin Rose, Google, and Dodgeball?

We talked about an awesome deerbell doorbell, we had a close encounter with the Deathstar, and almost voted Tootsie into the Whitehouse!

Remember our trip to Indiana-(what?)-polis? Or the time we hauled a christmas tree from the tree farm? And who can forget masquerading around town as Mr. Weekend Adventure?

We even dared the world to bare it all!

Yes Blog, there have been too many fun and exciting moments to give up on this life adventure. No more drama! I pledge to be a better blogger and give you more enjoyable content. I will also try to keep things interesting to keep your readership happy. Mr. Facebook and Miss Twitter will be thrilled to invite us to parties again, as will Sir Yahoo, Prince Google and Lord Microsoft. We’ll still be arriving in style in our sub-compact, but they will roll out the red carpet for us anyway.

So here’s to a new life together. One of a fun, savvy, and effortless witty style, doing things we once did best: writing for the love of writing.

Cheers,

Jason Murphy

PS – Sorry, this post was kinda gay. So is proofreading.

I haven’t been this excited for a baseball season in, well, 10 years. My favorite player has reunited with my favorite team. Welcome Home Griffey!

What is it?

Sophomore Heaven was a common term used back in my high school. In my district, to help with school population freshmen actually attended middle schools as the senior class (I can’t remember if that was state-wide or a county thing), so sophomores were the underlings, and thus the ones who received the blunt of all the junior and senior hi-jinks. One tradition was that during school assemblies, sophomores were required to sit in the balcony of the auditorium, while the main floor was reserved for seniors and juniors. If a sophomore was caught trying to be stealthy and sit on the main floor, a spotlight was placed on him and he was not-so-graciously escorted back to “sophomore heaven” by the Usher Squad (of which I was a member in both my jr. and sr. years) with much fanfare and heckling from all members of the audience.

It’s interesting that as you get older, the ages of people you associate with mean less and less. In high school, most kids would only associate with other kids of the same class. Sometimes the junior class would hang out with seniors, and sophomores with the juniors. But rarely did you see sophomores and seniors in the same groups together. Some of those lines still remained true during college. But once you enter the workforce, age difference means less and less. I’ve reported to bosses and business owners younger than me (and I was in my 20’s), but I’ve also employed people older than me. Socially speaking, nothing has quite been like the experience that high school was.

It’s funny, that social sites like Facebook are starting to work as an active memory for those old social lines. In the past few weeks, I’ve had many high school and college friends add me to their friends list. It’s weird because I haven not spoken to most of them since our graduation party, and some of them since before then. Once I graduated High School, I never really turned my back. I was gone. Along with many of the great friendships that I had created. I embarked in search of a new life, found it, and moved on. (I haven’t even looked at my yearbooks in the 11 years since graduating.) But, as with any part of my history, my high school past is still a deep part of me. And thanks to Facebook, its starting to catch up with me.

One of my favorite shows is Friday Night Lights. Not because I used to play football (4th or 5th string defensive end if I recall correctly), but because I really enjoy how accurately portrayed and well written the story lines are. Watching that show has brought a flood of memories back to me that I thought I had suppressed. From traditions like pep rallies, dances, and student elections, to teenage stresses such as studying, worrying about graduating and getting into college, and tests, to high school drama such as girlfriends, fights, cross-town rivalries, and cliques. I always thought high school was rough for me, but as I got older, I realized it was rough for everyone. Some while they were there, others once they left.

Knowing this is written publicly and anyone from my past can run across it at anytime, I’ve got to say something: To the 1996 class of Layton High School, thank you! Thank you to those who I played football, Ultimate Frisbee, basketball or baseball with, to those I ran track or threw boomerangs with, to those in video productions, business clubs, and programming, to those girlfriends and girls-I-wished-were-girlfriends, to those tight-knit group of friends, to the teachers, coaches and staff: THANK YOU! I am who I am because of you. And I’m doing just fine!

Sidenote: One thing is for sure, Sports marketers get it. I see them all over the social grid. They are where the fans are!