Lori frequently jokes with me that the iTest has been a terrible investment from the beginning and its only gotten worse. And from a current financial perspective, she would be right: thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours have been liberally poured into the project, with little financial return.

Additionally, it appears that our first sponsor, who will remain nameless here, has fallen through. This sponsor would have righted the financial ship, and then some, while using some of its technology to vastly improve the underlying infrastructure of the way I administer the annual competition.

Separately, the IRS is giving me a hell of a time with my non-profit 501(c)(3) application. They have issued a second round of questions, beyond the original application, for me to complete. Since I filed the form to apply for tax-exempt status, 9 months have passed and I still feel no closer to receiving the tax break. At this point, I am ready to discard them and move forward with the iTest as a private for-profit enterprise...but we'll see what happens over the rest of 2005.

I don't have time to feel sorry for myself, though. Nothing has fundamentally changed about the competition from when I created it in March 2004: the competition is a watershed educational tool that has never been done before, connecting the elitest of upper crust private high schools to the poorest of inner city public schools through mathematics and student competition.

Furthermore, there is no real competition. Competitive mathematics is a humorless field with a profound lack of innovators or capitalistic interests. Therefore, its not a surprise that the field hasn't moved forward much at all since I was in high school. Making this problem even worse is the growing disparity in the educational system between the "haves" and the "have-nots," which is creating a younger humorless class of high school students. I have witnessed many of these math-or-bust kids myself and found the experience disturbing.

Enough about those people. The key paradox here is that the more children we help and the more we improve the current state of the educational system, the more we set up the iTest to make a financial killing as a premiere educational brand.

My vision for the iTest is to become a portfolio of the nation's best competitions for high school students, while still being readily accessible to lower-income students as well as "normal" kids of all income-levels. We continue this march with a stellar iTest math exam to be given in September, and the launch of the iTest CS in April '06. Similar to the SAT II Subject Tests or AP exams, given in an array of fields....the iTest competitions will set the standard for high school academic competitions and will command interest through prizes, through innovation, and through humor.

This can't help but attract corporate interest. What we're doing is too innovative and too unique - and too popular! we're heading over the 30,000 student mark this year in math... - to not be noticed and funded. Or bought out.

Regardless of what the future holds, and Lori's instinctive questioning of my efforts, the iTest has begun, and success is not a matter of if, but when.