Aaron's Thoughts

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A couple of months ago my wife and I created a healthy app for kids called Food Buster for the USDA and Michelle Obama's Apps For Healthy Kids contest. Creating the game with my wife was a lot of fun, and I even learned a thing or two about food, calories, and exercise. What has ensued though has been nothing short of a humbling experience.  Once we had been selected as finalists we decided that should we win the popular vote we would donate the $4,500 prize to two great non-profits. This gave our efforts a purpose besides getting us to Washington D.C. and the support from friends, family, and total strangers was great.

We even got a little bit of air time from channel 6 San Diego:

We had a nice article written about us by the UCSD news, another great article in the North County Times, and just the briefest mention by the LA Times.

My wife and I had a great time building this app, getting people interested and educated about our cause and showing off our idea. We went to great lengths to get the word out, including dressing up in costume as a carrot and banana for web clips and walking around town:

 

The good news is we aren't done yet. Nope. We've got some great plans for Food Buster. New features, more interacive game playing, and better graphics, and sound. We got a lot of feedback these last few months and are excited to put it in to action.

We also just became members of a great program by Microsoft to support startups called BizSpark which helps new startup businesses get off the ground by giving them access to all the development tools Microsoft has to offer (all that  I'd ever need, that is). I'm proud to endorse this program and these tools. Building Food Buster in just a couple months in my off hours was only possible because I had access to great tools which made rapid development possible. I developed Food Buster using ASP.NET, jQuery Ajax, jQuery UI, SQL Server, and LINQ data objects.

Many thanks to Aaron and Lynn at Microsoft for inviting me to the program, setting me up with the tools and answering all the questions I had about it. We now have some very powerful tools to further develop with as well as access to some much needed server resources on the Azure cloud platform.

 

 

Wednesday is here and as you can see the fires have spread and continue to threaten a large area of San Diego. I'm working from home again today trying not to go stir crazy. Jesica, Ben and I went and saw The Darjeeling Limited. Jes and Ben went to Qualcomm yesterday to see if they could help out but there are so many San Diegans needing a hand they've actually told people not to come, there are too many volunteers. They also have too much food / water for now, but they need cots, air mattresses, and portable showers.


For those of you still concerned about where I am, here's a map to re-assure you a bit:

 

The yellow areas are evacuation areas, the red are areas that fire have been / are.

Jesica and I are heading out of town tomorrow night -- we've had a trip planned to San Francisco on the books so we've got plane tickets for Thursday night through Sunday which will be nice to get out of the bad air.

Thanks for the concern everyone.

 Well I'm fine, but a lot of people in San Diego are not. This is crazy, very reminiscent of the '03 fires that closed UCSD for days. My work (Taylor) is closed today and I'm working from home, so that's alright. We may be closed again tomorrow, I'm supposed to call in and check the company status.

Jesica and I are going to keep an ear to the news and if they need volunteers tonight we might go over to Qualcomm stadium and help out. They're asking people to stay off the highways and the phone lines for now, so we'll just do that.

My thoughts and prayers are with my co-workers who live in Escondido and Ramona who have already evacuated. For a minute-by-minute updated map you can check out this map.

Update: (6:45pm) -- Jesica and I investigated volunteering for the Red Cross but they currently do not have any openings for people with no current red cross volunteer statuses. They are doing trainings to become certified which doesn't help us as we only have our immediate time to give.

On a positive note, the air quality in Hillcrest / North Park is quite good, we must be in some kind of pocket as we can see smoke clouds in every direction but above we can see clear skies and stars. My work is also closed tomorrow, so I guess it's another day of working from home which isn't bad at all.

Update: (10:35pm) -- Ben's area is being evacuated, possibly voluntary but he says all of his neighbors in Mira Mesa are packing up and the news has said that reverse 911 calls are being made to Mira Mesa residents. He'll be spending the night over here. We're watching the maps / news but we're probably in the best place to be in San Diego. The air quality is still very good, although extremely dry. I'll keep you all posted.

Update:(10:50am) -- The fires continue in San Diego but we are still very far away from it. I'm again working from home and Ben and Jesica went over to Qualcomm stadium to see if there is anything they can help out with since both of their works have closed up for the day. The latest numbers I've heard are that 375,000 homes have been evacuated across the county.