Preparation, preparation, preparation

Even someone as pathetic and ineffective as Wesley Windham-Pryce knew: it's all about the preparation. You'd think one needed no preparation to go to a George Michael concert. Um, wrong! Well, if you just want to have a good time, showing up on the night is enough. But if for some reason you want to relive the experience later through text, pictures and video, you'd better come prepared.

I'm almost done with the preparations. Just as well, my first concert is not far away.

With 25Live I've sat in one dodgy internet café after another, sometimes in the middle of the night, writing reviews for the Dutch Planet George forum. This time around I've got an adorable tiny netbook (an Asus Eee PC) with WLAN. No more internet cafés for me, yay!
Of course my netbook is called 'LittleGeorge', what else? LittleGeorge has just had an internal memory upgrade  thanks to the incredibly nice guys at Paradigit. It can now comfortably handle multi-tasking and loading complex websites.

My pay as you go phone has had a generous top-up so that I can do the tweet-through-texting thingy. I'll just have to read up on how this works exactly and send some test tweets, because Twitter.com is still a bit of a mystery to me.

Batteries for my new camera are fully charged, so it's now ready for testing. Yes, new camera, because my beloved Cannon Powershot gave up the ghost just a few weeks ago. Just what I needed, buying a new camera. Finding a simple P&S camera isn't hard, there are so many of them. But if you want to shoot something halfway decent at a concert, it's quite another matter. Filming at a concert is a nightmare. With all the stage lighting there's far too much light, but not where the camera needs it. And of course there's altogether too much sound for a little compact camera to handle.

Fortunately all I want is proof on video that 'George was there and I was there too'. Even so, it's nice to get the best proof possible. But thanks to some great research by my gadget-loving wife I now own a Panasonic Lumix TZ8. We'd seen some great concert clips on Youtube shot with this camera. We'll see how it performs for me.

So now all I've got to do until the day of the concert is stay away from George-related news. I want it all to be a big surprise. It's very hard to stay spoiler-free but it'll be worth it in the end.