Conference & changing plans

I was scheduled to be in Europe this coming week to speak at the ELN / informatics conference in Amsterdam. Unfortunately, I have landed in the hospital with a respiratory infection. According to my dr. who just had a scope and vacuum down my lungs, it's like someone jammed gummy worms in my lungs. Nice picture, eh? Well, needless to say, since I cannot even carry on a decent conversation, the international travel will be out as well as the speaking for the moment. He is anticipating a long recovery cycle post release so I will have to figure out the work thing as well.

In the meantime, my wife is holding things together at home and running ragged. Hopefully, I will be home soon and we will get in a smooth grove to steady things out with home and kids as well as figuring out work.

Droid X and Froyo

Sometime around 3 this morning I updated to Froyo. Very cool and worth it. I have been stalking the net a bit looking for this update with the improved performance and capabilities and right out of the gate, the screen rotation, system performance, and keyboard jump out as improvements. The upgrade was painless and reasonably quick and all my apps seemed to migrate well though with over 300, it's hard to know for sure. I have to winnow through the stack a bit to see if any died in the upgrade.

My focus now is cleaning up the device from all my testing and sorting out the apps I am using. I have downloaded a few key utilities that make a difference and I will profile that final list here when I am closer to complete.

Update on the Droid

So I got my droid and have been playing with it steadily since. I am more and more impressed with it the longer I use it. It has the capability to be a lightweight laptop replacement and more. A few features have been especially helpful and fun. The Navigation bit is one of my favorites when I travel, as it is the best integrated platform I have experienced. The droid X ties in my music (streaming or local), navigation, and phone calls into one tight experience. It pauses my music for turn by turn alerts, re-routes dynamically as well as all the other standard stuff you would expect out of a nav system.

Beyond the nav, the music and entertainment capabilities are top notch with streaming media options, a nice integrated music player and a boatload of apps to pick from. I am quite happy with Pandora and the built in media player for now as most of the time I stream my tunes. I also have a selection of local (Philly) radio stations and a few others that I occasionally use though again, Pandora usually wins.