Marcus Hass' [MS] Blog : Personal

New Role for Mhass

mhass — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 08:09:59 GMT

So I finally rolled off my last gig, which had occupied me for the last 18 months. In the last 18 months, I learned a lot about how my customer did business, and thanks to a great account team, learned how Microsoft does business.

I liked the business aspect of the job a lot, enough to inspire me to move to a new team. I have moved onto the West Architecture team and will be working with customers throughout the Desert, Mountain, and SoCal parts of the US. It includes working with CIO's and VP's at numerous customers and helping account teams figure out how Microsoft can help them solve customer problems. I hope to be involved in a lot of sales cycles from initial talks all the way to implementation, ensuring that out technologies are deployed the best possible way.

Sounds kinda like a sales guy, sorry about that....

Transformers, go see it!

mhass — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 17:46:00 GMT

The red and blue cab of an 18 wheeler rolls into the center of the dark alley with led's and lights blazing, Autobot logo right on the grill. A bunch of spinning and servo sounds accompany the all too familiar whah-whah-whah-kuk sound of Transformer transformation. Everyone knows that it is Optimus Prime, but as soon as he stands up, the crowd erupts in cheers and wolf whistles. I get chills and get the tiniest bit emotional as I get to see a hero of my childhood, and get to see the look on my son Mason's face as he see the leader of the Autobots come to "real life".

Cheesy? Ya a bit. But, I was just young enough in 1984 to appreciate Transformers and have some of the original toys, including the die cast Optimus Prime and Soundwave, which my son now plays with.

This is one of the best movies I have seen in a long time, and am tempted to say I would put it in my top ten movies ever. Of course I have the emotional attachment to it, but it is very well done. It has a story, great acting by Shia LaBeouf, humor, teenage love story, and of course outstanding special effects. I really like that they kept Peter Cullen as the voice of Optimus Prime, the same as it was in the cartoons, it just added to the illusion that I was seeing my childhood buddy on screen.

Sorry for the spoiler Sean, but Jazz (the Solstice) has seen better days by the end.

Great Advertising, detonate a Ferrrari Enzo

mhass — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 19:04:00 GMT

I am a car lover, in fact we went to the Denver International Auto Show on Friday night with my son. I was there to see the Audi R8, hopefully sit in a couple cool cars, as well as check out updated cars like the Acura MDX and Infiniti M45.

But, the bigest news this last week was commedian Eddie Griffin plowing a Ferrrari Enzo into a cement barrier. The Ferrari is owned by one of the makers of the new movie "Redline", due out in theatres soon. Would I have known about this movie if he hadn't crashed the Enzo? Maybe, but now I may actually go see it because along with the crash many news outlets ran the trailer.

Looking at the footage, you can hear him on the brakes where he probably should have been nailing the gas to bring the tail out to make the corner. Either he really sucks at driving, and shouldn't have been in anything more powerful than a Dodge Neon, or it is a marketing ploy (the Intertubes are buzzing about Hoaxes and marketing). Horrible tragedy to demolish such a rare exotic, but 1.5 million well spent on advertising. Actually, now that I think about it, demolishing a car of this stature doesn't deserve my direct revenue at the theatres, I'll wait till it hits Netflix.

A High Tech visit to the dentist

mhass — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 03:33:00 GMT

This week I had the chance to catch up on some much needed personal maintenance, including a visit to the dentist. Like most people, I have usually gone to the dentist that my wife or parents have gone too, without much research into the doctor, office, or technology. In fact, out of all medical related things, the dentist has always been a secretive-put-all-your-trust-in-the-guy-digging-around-in-your-mouth-thing. I hate it when I don’t know if the guy with the drill is looking out for my best interest, or trying to fund their new condo in Aspen or a 5 star trip to Brazil. After a few years at my wife’s old school dentist, it was time for a change into the 21^st century.

I had seen that some dentists do everything from digital x-rays, movies on the ceiling, and even massages. In order to assure that they are most likely current with technology, I came up with a list of criteria:

· The dentist has to have a web site

· They at least have to have an email address, and reply back if I email them promptly

· (optional) Be able to book appointments online

· They have to be able to book me an appointment with the next two weeks. My old dentist would literally take 3 months for the next available appointment.

· I want to see a picture of their lobby on their web site

· I want to see a picture of their treatment rooms/chairs

· They better have an LCD hanging above the chair

· Take my insurance or at least make it simple by filing my insurance reimbursement for me

· Be near my work so that I don’t have to take much time off

Geeky? Yes. High expectations? Yes. Did I find what I was looking for? Yes.

Let me introduce you to my new dentist, Angela Osborn, DDS. BTW, I didn’t get any type of discount, nor did she know I would blog about this. But, I had such a cool experience (even though I had to have a lot of work done), that I had to tell all my geeky friends about it.

So, I “Live Searched” (you thought I was going to say Googled, huh) a dentist on Lone Tree, Colorado and found her web site. Let me first address a couple things that I didn’t like about the web site, remember this is a geek talking that uses the Internet heavily, opinions may be different for” normal” users.

1) It has an intro. Intro’s scream to me late 90’s when you wanted to attract a lot of attentions by saying “look I forked out the big bucks to have someone flashize my web site”.

2) It has sound whether you are on the Intro or main info page. Ya, you can turn it off, but if you are in an office, the prairie dogs start popping up in cubicle town when you get surprised with sound from a web site.

3) The main site is completely flash driven, with navigation on the right and frames, kinda. It took me about 30 seconds to figure out how to navigate and in Internet time, this is an eternity. The site could easily be converted to HTML/ASP/JAVA and still retain most of the ambience but make navigation normal and support small devices better.

Getting past the web site, the experience was nothing short of fantastic, yes I said fantastic about a dentist visit. I was able to grab all forms I needed from the web site, so signing in was easy. Brenda at the front desk was able to schedule me for about a week out, and called back the next day and offered me an immediate opening. Brenda was also great because she asked for my insurance information and called the insurance immediately to find out what they covered.

When I arrived, it was like sitting in the waiting room at the spa with nice tile floor, furniture, and faux painted walls. They got to me pretty quick, and Tracy starting doing a full X-ray of my mouth. I was able to watch the X-rays pop up on the LCD in front of me. Then came something I hadn’t anticipated, speech recognition. Tracy spent the next 10 minutes probing each of my teeth and dictating the state of the surrounding gum tissue to the computer. It was a bit long, but worth it as she dictating things like “no, 3, no” which means I didn’t have plaque, the gum tissue was at level 3 (level 1-3 is good), and that when she probed it didn’t bleed. All this is also feed onto the screen and kept as a permanent record for comparison in the future.

After the standard cleaning, Dr. Osborn came in to check for cavities and look at my x-rays. I didn’t expect any because I have had really good luck with my teeth. Then came the bad news, I had a few potential bad places, but the real story was that where I had some fillings in the past showed signs of damages and decay around them. How did I know she wasn’t pimping me for some money? She stuck a camera in my mouth, snapped some pictures like the one shown here and showed me on the monitor the nasty spots. Proof! That is what I wanted; it got rid of shroud of mystery of the dentist.

Dr. Osborn’s practice hit 8 out of 9 of my criteria, and has already started directing some of my friends and family there. I went back the following week to have my teeth fixed, and Dr. Osborn did an excellent job.

Five things you don’t know about mhass

mhass — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 20:07:00 GMT

I know, I know, it’s been all the rage lately, and I kinda find it entertaining and cool to find out things about your favorite bloggers that you didn’t know. Not that I am anyone’s favorite blogger.

Here are a five things you didn’t know about me.

1) My parents are both immigrants from Brasil, and I had dual citizenship from Brasil and USA until I was 18 even though I was born in the US.

2) I drove up Pike’s Peak with a learner’s permit when I was 15½

3) I took a lot of art classes in middle school and high school winning several car design and drafting contests (ironically, one of the contests was at Riverfront which in now a call center for Dish Network which is one of my customers). Maybe that is why I enjoy using PowerPoint and Visio, but hate that they are so rigid and limited from an art perspective. Mac’s were way better for drawing even back in the 80’s.

4) The first computer I ever used was an Apple IIplus in Elementary school in 1980 (third grade). In subsequent years, Mr. Lees our gym teacher would let us sneak in and play pirated video games on his 2 Apples during recess.

5) German was my first language, I can still understand and speak German, but I wish I had an outlet to practice it more.

Moving within Microsoft

mhass — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 19:35:00 GMT

What I have been doing, instead of keeping up on my blog entries? Well,lots. One of the biggest things for me is that we rearranged a few accounts in Denver, where I live. With the help of my manager, and encouragement from local managers, I was asked/encouraged to move to the Desert Mountain geography Consulting Services. I have been with Microsoft going on 7 years, and all of it has been in Microsoft Consulting Services in the Communication Sector.

What is the Communications Sector? Well, it is a vertical foucsed on telecommunications customers. Living in Denver, we used to me a mecca for telecommuncations customers, so if you lived here and were in the Communcations Sector, life was good because there wasn’t much travel. Over the last 6 years with consolidations, coprorate scandals, and changes in the telco industry things have been moving out of Denver or scaling back with our big local telcos.

This isn’t to say that I mainly worked in Denver for the last 6 years. I have often jumped on to large, difficult projects to advance my knowlegde and career. I spent an entire year workign as a the lead on a large project in Germany, where my family and I spent a lot of time in Germany, France, and Holland. I also found a good friend and mentor who managed a large telco account in the Washington DC area, and ended up working out there a lot with his team. St. Louis, Ft. Lauderdale, New Jersey, San Fransisco, Dallas, Ricmond,….. they take a toll on your family.

So, the account that I have been working with for most of this year in Denver moved to the Desert Mountain group. The customer expressed an interest in having me back long term and in a more strategic role. So, long term engagement + local + great management team + strategic role = happy family, happy consultant. It was a no brainer in the end, but it is hard to leave Communications Sector where I know so many people that have been good to me over the years.

Starting on November 27 I will be starting a new role, called Enterprise Strategy Consultant (ESC). Actually, we have a very formal ESC role, this is more of a Senior Constulant role as an ESC so I hope to stay very hands on, but also help my customer develop a vision and strategy around Microsoft and other products.

What am I doing right now and for the last few months? I’ll have some of that in my next few posts including .NET 3.0 and my thoughts on Xbox Live and Texas Hold Em’.

Scary day in Philadelphia

mhass — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 22:15:00 GMT

I am here in Philadelphia this week working with Comcast in their towers right across from City Hall. I was walking back from lunch at about 1:15 and there was a massive BOOM in the alley in front of me. Everyone either hunched or screamed, I instinctively moved towards a door of the building I was walking in front of. A ton of birds took flight as the concussion bounced off all the cement and glass of the buildings.

After a few seconds of looking around, we all assumed the construction crane across the street had accidentally dropped its load until someone noticed that there was no one in the cab. We then all put ourselves back together and tried to continue on our way until a police officer stopped us about 10 feet from the alley and said there had been an explosion, that he couldn’t answer any questions, and we would need to turn around. After some protest by people I can only assume had really, really important things to do, I turned around. Not before I noticed the manhole cover had been flung off the manhole in the alley, and there was already a fire truck sitting in the street in front of the alley. The picture shows the alley and smoke (sorry for the quality, it is all my Motorola Q could muster).

I walked around the block and there was thick black smoke coming from the back of the tower that I was working in. When I reached the main entrance to City Center, fire alarms were ring, and people were streaming out of the building. The plaza quickly filled with thousands of people who were all looking skyward to see smoke drifting between the buildings.

Within 5 minutes, there were many fire trucks and a few ambulances. I hope that the firefighters are able to put out the fire, without any injuries. We also started seeing news helicopters hovering overhead getting shots of the smoke in the alley.

After about 20 minutes, everyone started to move across the street into the park that surrounds City Hall. If there was a real emergency, why do we always want to stand close to it and know what is going on? Is our flight response tainted? I blame rock n’ roll music and video games for numbing our sense of urgency. J

It sounds like the power company was doing some underground work when some transformers exploded. Which explains why police and fire trucks were already in the area.

I am back at my hotel in the business center writing this and letting my friend and family know that I am okay. I still hear many emergency vehicle sirens, so I can only assume that they are still battling the fire.

Now, I just have to figure out how to get my laptop back from the 33^rd floor….

Update: A really cool security guard took me back up to the 33rd this evening to grab my tablet and bag. He told me that they were shutting power to the building off in a few minutes to fix whatever blew up. He said that the building probably wouldn't be open on Friday.

Thank you: Steve Irwin

mhass — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 04:38:00 GMT

I have been on vacation for the past few days, but have been inundated with information about Steve Irwin’s death. For my family, this was very sad news as we have watched many of his shows and appearances since the late 90’s.

Many of the comments from people have been comical from “you knew it would happen someday” to criticism about him dangling his son Bob as he feed a crocodile a few years ago. And, I know that many native Aussie’s don’t enjoy the perception he has given the world that Australia is full of crocodiles and crazy safari-shirt wearing men.

If you really watch his shows, you see a man that fights for and loves the natural world. He had intense passion around sharing it with others. From what I understand, Steve and his family live a very modest lifestyle on premises at Australia’s Zoo. The money that he makes off the shows is spent improving his Zoo, education programs, and setting aside 1000’s of acres of Australian outback for animal rehabilitation and natural preserve.

Update: I thought I would share something funny that in retrospect probably occurred several hours before Steve Irwin's death. My wife Deanna and I decided to take my son Mason and daughter Kendall down to Garden of the Gods this last Sunday to walk around the rocks and generally be outside on a beautiful day. While walking on the path, my wife was on “snake alert” because rattlesnakes have been known to occasionally bite tourists that wander off the paths. While watching the sides of the path, Mason spotted some deer or rabbit dung (a six year old is a fart and poop expert). He quickly started to try an Australian accent and act like Steve Irwin examining the poop to determine what the animal might be. For the next fifteen minutes our entire family had Australian accents talking about poop.

Steve Irwin has taught us to respect and appreciate our environment, and do what we can to preserve it. My family will truly miss seeing this amazing man and his family on TV. Our deepest sympathies to his friends and his family: Terri, Bindi and Bob.

Zidane: Anger Management

mhass — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 23:47:00 GMT

What a bummer that someone like Zinedine Zidane went out on a bad note. I prefer not to think of him as a bad guy, as much as having a bad day. He has had a career worthy of Pele, Maradona, Ronaldo, Beckham or Ronadinho and deserves his head up on the “Mt. Rushmore” of futbol.

In fact, after my home team of Brasil (my parents are both from Brasil) was trounced I really started liking how France was playing. The combination of Ribalry hustling up and down the field, Henry and Zidane working together was awesome. Even despite personally having some bad social experiences while in France, they were the team I was cheering for until the end.

I don’t like having to explain to my son Mason, who loves playing soccer, what the head butt was all about. But, I hope that people will remember some of the beauty of play that Zidane brought to the game over the years. Maybe some anger management or easing up on the Red Bulls would have helped France win.

Anil also made a funny clip about the head butt

Worldly (Cup) Views

mhass — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 21:55:00 GMT

I was just catching up on some of my reading and saw several people mentioning that they read Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” book. Scoble even went so far as to describe editorials he wrote in college about raising gas taxes by several dollars to encourage Americans to buy smaller cars and get car companies to make more efficient cars. I kinda like this idea.

4 years ago, I spend most of a year in Germany with my family while I was leading a project there for Microsoft. I think that spending a lot of time there made me realize how arrogant and wasteful Americans are when it comes to cars. I really can’t see why Americans need big SUV’s, with 5.0+ Litre engines. Off roading? Please. I am more apt to buy a mid size SUV or wagon that can seat 5+ people than an American made goliath. Even midsize SUV’s from American makers come with pocket draining V8’s, although there are exceptions. BTW Joern, what happened to us upgrading your environment during this year’s world cup?

When my brother in law asked me several years ago what truck they should buy, I recommended a couple mid size SUV’s. Their requirement was room for 7, of which there are several mid size SUV’s that can hold 7 that don’t have a 6.1 L gas guzzling engine like the Denali they ended up buying. Now it takes him close to $75 to fill the tank and gets at best 13 miles to the gallon. Yikes.

I am reminded about all of this because I was in Germany when the World Cup was going on in 2002, and how passionate they were about soccer. I am no stranger to this as I have been to a couple bloody ~~brawls~~ soccer games when I have been in Brasil with my parents (both immigrated to the US from Brasil). But, Germans are just as passionate about things like recycling, more efficient cars (diesels), and family life as they are about soccer. It has always seemed to me that as a society, Germans (and most Europeans) have their priorities much more in line with “saving the planet” than Americans.

What am I trying to say? I don't know. I just feel like we (Americans) don't take our role in the global environment seriously, and the only way to make a point is to do it monetarily. I hope Al Gore keeps up the pressure and makes something out of his new cause and can genuinely change attitudes about America’s obsession with big, bloaty SUV’s.

Oh, and go Brasil!

Take a vacation!

mhass — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 17:08:00 GMT

Take a vacation, a long one. Don’t mess around with the 4 day weekend vacations, or even a week. If you are an IT person, you need to take a vacation long enough to make you forget passwords.

I just got back from my first real vacation in 3 years, and it was 2 weeks long. I turned off my phone and didn’t even turn on my laptop during for two weeks. Here is kinda how the “tech detox” went.

Day 1 – Packing up, cleaning the house

Day 2 – Head to the airport, stressful day flying to another country, but everything worked out

Day 3 – Orient yourself with your surroundings, still in tech mode (oh look, they have Internet Kiosks, must resist)

Day 4 – Eat, swim, eat, swim, eat

Day 5 – Lather, Rinse, Repeat

Day 6 – Lather, Rinse, Repeat, start to relax, play some volleyball

Day 7 – Forget first password

Day 8 – Almost turn on phone to data sync, wife slaps hand

Day 9 – Eat, swim, eat, swim, eat, ahhhhhhh……

Day 10 – ahhhhh……

Day 11 – ahhhhh……

Day 12 – Travel back to home, not as stressful as journey down

Day 13 – Start checking email again

So, you can see it took over a week to start to relax. I think that high tech folks have brains that are geared for retention and we suffer from withdrawal when we can’t IM, email or text. You have to recharge and detox every year, so figure out how you can get away for at least 2 weeks.

BTW, good luck Scoble, we will miss your candor and insight into Microsoft.

Comcast Improves, and I finish my home theatre

mhass — Sat, 08 Apr 2006 08:44:00 GMT

So, I decided to get a powered CATV amplifier for my house to see if my loosing picture with Comcast was maybe just the box saying “weak signal”. Well, this has solved the issue of it loosing picture! But, we are still having to power down the settops every couple weeks because it freaks out and I can’t rewind a recorded show, or we get this repetitious pixilization while watching a show. Giving the box a 5 minute time-out seems to solve the problem, but man is it inconvenient when you are recording a show.

I got my basement finished about a year ago, with the intentions of putting together a mid range home theatre. We didn’t want to have a dedicated room as a theatre, rather we wanted a living room that had a great screen and sound. This allows us to keep an eye on the kids as they play in the basement in their playroom. After a year of buying good speakers and components at cheap prices off eBay it is done. The crowning jewels were a Mitsubishi 4000U projector and a Vutec Silverstar screen (these were by far the most expensive parts).

I had Scott from Soundhounds get the projector and screen since they are supposed to only be available through authorized dealers, although I saw the projector on buy.com. Scott got my projector and screen all dialed in, and tuned up my sound system (sound pressure meter, etc). I highly recommend that if you are going to procure your stuff alone like me, that at some point you have someone like Scott come in and get it all tuned up properly. If you live in Denver and need some help, tell him I sent you as he has a great referral program. If you need a kick butt screen, also give him a call and get the Vutec screen.

Here is a picture of the completed room with components all fired up:

What did you do over the holidays?

mhass — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 02:27:00 GMT

Man, where do I start? December was absolutely nuts as far as work. I had “real” work to do for customers, training, vacation, holidays….phew.

The absolute most exciting thing I did was we took my son on his Make-A-Wish trip to Disneyworld. As many of you that follow my blog know, my son was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) about 3 years ago. He has about 4-5 months left of treatment, and so we timed his trip to when he was almost done.

The trip honestly meant the world to our family, and I can’t say enough about how awesome an idea the Make-A-Wish foundation is! We meet some other families at Give Kids the World in Orlando that had a wide variety of life threatening illnesses, and I could see that theses trips help inspire and relieve a lot of the stress they face in their daily lives.

Make-A-Wish, Disney, Universal Studios and SeaWorld make these trips perfect for families. We arrived late at night, and hurried over to Give Kids the World to pick up some information and our tickets. We received pretty much the best tickets you can get to all the attractions as well as “Guest Assistance Passes” (GAP). The GAP passes basically flag the staff to do what they can to help you along in line, sometimes this means coming in the exit or handicapped line. At Universal, they sometimes lead us in through secret, behind the scenes passages, it was unreal.

All of this, made my son feel like a rock star. I can’t thank all the organizations involved enough, it was truly the trip of a life time!

If you are looking for a “pet” charity that does incredible things for kids that face life threatening illnesses, please consider putting your money, time, etc towards Make-A-Wish.

BTW, my 1 year old daughter threw up all over me within 5 minutes after take off of a 4 hour flight on our way back. It helped me build a lot of character and smell on the way home.

Grayline Tours: Parking Garages of High Tech Companies

mhass — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 23:31:00 GMT

I love coming up to Redmond or going out to Silicon Valley, and not because of the brain power harnessed in these locations. It’s all about the cars. I am a “car guy”, even though my personal cars are not that exciting. I joined Microsoft after the boom years, so I don’t have profits from options and stock splits to blow on my favorite car. I have to live vicariously through coworkers and drooling over their cars in the garages as I visit building on campus.

Maybe someone at Grayline could get together a business plan for car guys to tour the garages of high tech companies. I can imagine the guy/gal with the silky voice sitting in the reverse jump seat at the front of the bus saying, “On the right we have the red 2004 Porsche Carrera 4s, on the left notice the Dinan badged 2002 M5’s, coming up straight ahead notice the Ferrari 360 Modena of Vice President….”.

The only thing I haven’t figured out is how to get a shuttle bus to fit in the parking garages…

What it is like to run a 1/2 Marathon with 15,000 others

mhass — Tue, 25 Oct 2005 07:08:00 GMT

I just got back to Denver, and finally have a stable Internet connection. I was in downtown San Francisco, staying at the Renaissance Parc 55, and for the life of the SSTN Highspeed Internet provider, they couldn’t provide me with Internet in my room. So, I did what every good geek would do and mooched wifi from adjacent buildings. Never before in my life have I seen 23 different SSID broadcast in one place, half of them open! But I was getting weak signals, so I could bounce from one another, but never got a great connection for more than a few minutes.

So, what is running a 13.1 marathon like? Well, this is actually called the Nike Women’s Marathon, but it was my wife’s idea so I go with it. It was 99% women, so it made for an interesting day. I also decide that I will be my wife’s running partner for the day since most of our team is doing the full marathon, and since I hurt my foot an can’t run the full and am not racing for a specific time.

Mile (-0.1) – 15,000 people packed into Union Square at 6:00-7:00 am. Damn it is cold. The Kenyan’s and Olympic mendalists are up at the front, we are divided by pace. Because I run an average 10:00 mile and my wife about an 11:00 we are parked in front of Macy’s listening to the teacher from Charlie Brown over the PA system.

Mile (-0.1) (7:00 am) – We all cheer, the crowd moves about 500 feet. Screeching halt.

Mile (-0.5) – The cattle start moving slowly, an occasional MOOOO! Can be heard, mainly by me.

Mile 0 – The pace picks up and people are actually starting to run down the hill into San Fran’s financial District. I try and keep it light and notice that there is a Versace store and ask my wife if she would like to stop. Scolding glare.

Mile .75 – I think we just passed the Microsoft NorCal Office. Round the corner onto the Embarcadero.

Mile 1- I’m hot, off with the long sleeve t-shirt, hold in hand for bag check at mile 2.5.

Mile 2.5 – Check wife’s jacket and my t-shirt, notice extreme lines for port-o-potties throughout the race.

Mile 3 – Fisherman’s Warf, ask wife if we can grab a quick crab sandwich. Scolding glare.

Mile 4 – Up into Fort Mason, steep hill, who would have known that this was the smallest hill on the course?

Mile 5, 6 – Nice and flat into the Presidio along the bay. Hear the fog horn and can hardly see the bottom of the pillars of the Golden Gate bridge.

Mile 6 – The Hill. We climb up into the Presidio and cross the half way mark for the Half Marathoners. The hill just seems to go on and on, we have to half walk, half walk, and half climb. Our cheering section appears at about mile 6.8, good inspiration wish they had brought motorized running shoes.

Mile 7 – Downhill on the Pacific side, we can hear the ocean crashing down the cliffs, but the fog makes it impossible to see.

Mile 8 - Who the hell builds roads and houses on these hills? I thought they said that there weren’t as many hills this year? We pass Robin William’s cliff side house.

Mile 9 – Downhill towards the cliff house restaurant and the Great Highway.

Mile 10 – Finally see the waves and the Ocean

Mile 11- We turn into Golden Gate park, up another, gentler hill. Marathoners and half Marathoners are split.

Mille 12 – Bison in Golden Gate park? That isn’t right.

Mile 13 – Approaching the finish line, big crowds, lots of inspiration.

Mile 13.1 – Finish! We both get necklaces from Tiffany’s guys in tuxedo. I threaten to sell mine on eBay. Scolding glare.

The runner’s plaza at the end had t-shirts, food, massages, and the dreaded coat check. OMG, the line for the coat check was unbelievable, until they told half the people they were in the wrong line. Then, they didn’t give us good directions where to find our stuff. Note to Nike: fix the coat check stuff next time.

Overall, it was awesome, and the people cheering along the way were inspirational. It is good to know that combine we raised over 14 million dollars to fight Leukemia, Lymphoma and other blood cancers.

As for my running career? I am considering running the Nike Rock and Roll Marathon in Phoenix in January or possibly training for a triathlon. Either way, I plan to keep it up, I had lost 15 lbs at one point (will get back to that weight in a few weeks), and I feel the best I have felt since High School. I also feel that this has helped me improve my performance at work by making me sleep better and think faster and more clearly.

I would highly recommend a Team in Training type program for those of you that have troubles staying motivated to loose weight or become better athletes. When you have a date set for something like this it really helps, not to mention that if you are forced to raise money by asking people to donate you won’t let them down.

Thank you everyone for your support.