We first met Liyan back in 1995 when I (Sue) was working at Channel 1 and my son (Caz) was 10 years old. Liyan had recently moved to the US from China, was somewhat shy about his English, and was the best HTML hand coder working for us. Our pixel image is from that time, when Caz would come in to work with me, play computer games and surf the newly blossoming Web with us. In the summer of 1996, Caz had me shave half his head and dye the remaining side bright green. Liyan had a cross country road race and asked me to shave some crazy equation on his head having to do with Einstein's theory of relativity and time dilation and involving the Lorentz factor, or some such thing. It was really hard to do as I didn't really have the right equipment being kind of a spontaneous request at work one day. All I know is that when Liyan sets his mind to do something, he gets it done. This formula was part of his whole philosophy for running at the time, somehow the more he would run and/or the faster he would run the more he would approach making up for the time to gain back the time... I'm not sure I totally understood him then and I certainly can't remember the details now, but I do remember the impact it had on me. I don't remember whether he won that particular race, although I remember him telling me his science (or math?) teacher was impressed and had him show off his unique hair style(?) to the class. Anyhows, the point of this whole story is that Liyan has always been running and has always been amazing and the moment he told me about this crazy idea to run with a flag to raise a million dollars I knew it was gonna be happening...

Run, Liyan, Run!