A Droid For Father's Day?

I've been too busy this weekend to write a full blog entry so I'll just let you know of some stuff I've been working on. I've been very busy over the past month. First and foremost, it is Father's Day. To find out how my fathers and grandfathers helped solidify my weather enthusiasm, read my 2007 blog entry "My Family's Contribution To My Weather Interest." Here is my father and me at my college graduation:

Of course I am a father myself these days and I'm proud of my step-daughter even though science is not her favorite subject, she still excels in it (to be honest she does well in everything!)

In other news I've finally purchased a Motorola Droid phone, which I reviewed over Christmas. Not really for Father's Day, but because my Verizon contract was up. The Android apps available for it are truly changing my life, and allowing me to stay more up-to-date with Facebook and email, and making me more efficient and effective at my job and staying in contact with my family.

There are apps that my Dad would have loved -- in addition to being an amateur scientist, meteorologist, photographer and musician, he dabbled in astronomy. Having several telescopes, I remember observing Halley's Comet with him in the middle of the night in 1986. Take Google SkyMap for example. Looking at the stars at night? Hold your Droid up to the sky and it will show you which stars are which as you move it around (the video below doesn't do it justice).

There are apps like RunKeeper which help me keep track of my exercise (literally, here's a graph and map of where I walked my dog the other night):

There are apps which are simply fun like Layar, which uses your camera and GPS to overlay information on top of buildings in your camera view.

And then there are apps that simplify my storm chasing and weather photography, for example AccuWeather.com (home screen widget shown below), Google Maps, Compass, and Navigator (that's right, there's a free app for GPS navigation, throw your old GPS in the trash). There's even an app that shows the National Weather Service radar loop as the background image for your phone. Heck the phone itself even has a decent camera if I get caught without mine.

And if that's not enough, the phone can surf the web (the real web, not the lame mobile web), check email and read (and post to) Facebook like a pro.