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Spending your time away from home for 1/3 of the year definitely broadens your horizon and presents lots of opportunities to meet great people, exploring new cultures and outdoor activities in the real world (it’s getting too virtual lately, isn’t it?).

While in 2007 I spent less than 100 days on the road, 2008 was pretty active with 120+ days abroad (Austria, Germany, Slovakia, Switzerland, Ireland, Italy, Greece and the USA, to mention some of the destinations.) I will try to keep the trend for 2009 with more business and exploration trips – mostly between February and July – from SES to Northern Ireland to Everest base camp.

All of this could be easily tracked with Travel 2.0 web services like Dopplr and TripIt. You can forward your booking confirmations to plan@tripit.com and automatically sync your iCal with a feed, that has useful info. You get notifications when you will be in the same city as your friends, controling who can see your trips and collaborate on them.

The Dopplr annual report is real fun and almost real picture of your trips, especially if they are linked with flickr.

Dopplr report

” You took 15 trips in 2008, which added up to 14,134 km or 3% of the distance to the moon. Everyone on Dopplr travelled a total of 1331.4 million km in 2008: the approximate distance to Saturn from the Earth as of January 2009. Your personal velocity for 2008 was 1.61 km/h, which is about the same as NASA’s crawler. The 5 most popular cities in your network are Stockholm, Lisbon, Zürich, Cairns and Brussels. We couldn’t calculate the carbon footprint of your travels for 2008 because at the moment, you’re not using that feature. In 2008, the average carbon of those who are tracking the impact of their travels on Dopplr was 6,413 kg CO2.”

So, where you gonna go next in 2009?

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Smartphone

HTC Touch pro

If you need mobile office power, fast clickable touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard, GPS and Wi-Fi,  you probably will check the top5 business smart-phones: BlackBerry Storm, Palm Treo Pro,  Nokia E71 and Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, Tmobile G1 …

…but you may end your holiday with HTC’s Touch Pro, like I did.

All you need – wherever you are.

Digital Camera

Canon PowerShot SX1

Recently gone through some hunting, I  decided to compare Canon EOS 450D with the new Powershot SX1.  The pictures from the dSLR were comparable to the ones by the SX1, which is a great hybrid – crisp macro and enormous telephoto zoom in a one-hand package was a perfect fit.
If you wanna get rid of your old and heavy SLR,  Canon SX1 is empowered with features never seen before on a compact camera:

• 20x wide-angle optical zoom
• 10 Megapixel CMOS
• new DIGIC 4 processor for fast performance
• 4 fps continuous shooting and
• full HD movie capture!

2009 will be the year of the rich, detailed, crisp full HD images in a wide ISO range of shooting situations with full manual control on the move.

All-in-one LCD Monitor

Samsung T260HD

I was tired of messing with 3 screens in the studio, so an upgrade to a full HD, crystal clear LCD monitor with integrated DTV tuner was a perfect fit.
The Samsung T260HD is a 26″ Widescreen full HD+ (1920×1200) resolution with embedded DTV tuner, 10000:1 dynamic contrast, 2 invisible built-in SRS TruSurround speakers and 5ms grey-to-grey response time.
The viewing angle in both axis is over 160 degrees, so I can follow what’s is going on literally from everywhere, even from the bent glass bathtub. Finally all video cables go to the same unit – Analog RGB, DVI, HDMI, Component, and TV.  The only problem I had was, that there is no VESA wall mount, so I had to mount it on a wall TV swivel/ tilt stand.

MIDI controller/ Stage piano

KAWAI mp5

8 years later I’m happy to get back to daily jam sessions with hundreds of native sampled instruments, played on an advanced hammer action professional stage piano. After testing CME VX8 and Yamaha Motif XS8, I decided to stick to KAWAI and their 80 years of piano sound experience. The new KAWAI MP5 is sure to satisfy the most demanding performer’s need for impeccable sound quality, responsive touch, 4 zones and powerful control.  Not to mention using it as master 88-key MIDI controller in your  home-based studio. Boasted with 256 high-quality instrument sounds,  including Kawai’s famous Concert Grand piano, the sound is awesome! Hope to find a KAWAI K1 library, which was my favorite 12 years ago.

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