Acknowledgments

We’d like to thank everyone who helped us along the way: Mike Coffey (KJ4Z); Carl Lyster (WA4ADG); the other fine folks of the University of Tennessee Amateur Radio Club, LVL1 Hackerspace, and the White Star Balloon Project; and especially Dan Bowen, High Altitude Balloon Engineer. Their tremendous expertise, support, and encouragement turbo-boosted our planning and significantly increased our chance of success!

Fergus Noble of Swift Navigation, for helping us with our Android GPS hacking.

Valley Crop Dusters, for letting us launch our first balloon off their runway.

6th Street Dinner, for providing mid-launch nourishment in the form of the best nachos in Los Banos!

Starbucks, for being open at 4:30am to fuel our early morning excursions.

Casa de Fruta, for being a fascinating roadside attraction and the inspiration for our club name.

SL Huang, who was there in spirit if not in person. She was also our deus ex machina, copyediting this blog late into the night on the eve of our website launch.

The Google Developer Studios team who made our 4th launch the biggest adventure of all! Especially Brian, who stuck with us to the very end, and Jamie, who handled diplomatic negotiations with aplomb.

Angelina Wedemeyer for putting up with our crazy requests while helping us make this awesome website. She made the balloon go up, and for that we will eternally squee!

Our website design used aspects from the following open source templates. The site is based on the Worthy template, and the idea of the rising balloon was spurred from the template Expose. The wonderful timeline was customized from the Agency template. The balloon-eye view video was conceived after reviewing the Design Agency template.

The beautiful image representing "Inspiration", under "Our Journey", is by Kevin Barba and used under Creative Commons. The only modification we made was to crop the image. You make awesome art, Kevin! Thanks for licensing it under Creative Commons!

The "Beware Rattlesnakes" photo on the homepage is from Susan Renee and is used under Creative Commons with no modifications. Sadly, we did not take a picture of a similar sign we encountered during our last balloon recovery adventure, so thank you, Susan, for coming to our rescue with your fantastic Creative Commons photography!

The photo of the San Luis Reservoir on our "Where's the Water?" blog post is from Ken Lund and and is used under Creative Commons with no modifications. We are shocked at how much the drought has impacted the reservoir and wish to give a big thanks to Ken for capturing it so perfectly.