Recently in Wedding Category

I've been sitting on this for a while, gradually adding more bits as I think of them. So it's a bit long and rambly, but if I don't post it now I'll never get round to it.

First, the details, for anyone who cares.

I got married to my partner of 11 years, Katherine, on 1st December. This was actually our 11 year anniversary. We had a civil ceremony in The Assembly House, Norwich with a wine reception afterwards, then moved on to Wolterton Hall for the main reception, with a magnificant feast provided by Brasteds. Afterwards there was a chocolate fountain courtesy of Digby's and Nero thanks to Milton.

The wedding cars were provided by American Dream (we had the Excalibur Sedan and the Lincoln Town Car). The bus to/from the reception was from Dolphin Autos. Robin Phillips brought the band. Wonderful purple jacket + the other suits were from John Field Formal Hire.

Next, some photos.

Burly Dave Ganesh Paddy Steve Tim (Ceremony) Tim (Reception)

Finally, some things I've learned.

For guests (I wish someone had told me these - Katherine says I sound stroppy but I don't mean to):

• As soon as you know if you're going or not, let the couple know. Especially if you're not going. They will probably be constrained on numbers and there are very few people who can be invited at short notice if you only let them know you're not coming by the RSVP deadline.

• Don't leave buying your present until the last minute. The couple will have lots more important things on their minds in the final week or two than trying to make sure there's enough left on the gift list.

• People really do mean that they'd rather you turned up than gave a gift. I never fully appreciated this; I'd feel bad going to a wedding without having given a gift. However I know that it's not cheap to get to Norwich and (in most cases) have to spend at least one night in a hotel. I'd much rather people did that and I got to see them on the day than they sent a present.

For couples getting married:

• It costs more than you think. Really. I'd always assumed hotels dug their arm in for weddings and upped all the prices, but actually the hotels we looked at were the cheap options, both in terms of the actual cost and also the fact they'd throw extras like a honeymoon suite in for free.

• Make sure everyone in the wedding party knows the way to the ceremony venue. Really. Don't rely on them to ask you, or assume that they'll have looked at the directions you've prepared.

• People are far too generous. We received many completely unexpected gifts from relatives or friends who we hadn't invited to the wedding, or those who couldn't make it. (As well as many of the people who came to the wedding buying us far too much.) If you gave us a gift, you will get a thank you card - these are already in progress but it probably won't be until after the New Year before they're all sorted and sent.

• Don't leave booking a honeymoon until after the wedding. We had issues regarding not being sure about Katherine's holidays and we ended up not sorting anything until a couple of weeks later. This reduced our options somewhat.

• So far it doesn't seem to have changed anything much. Katherine and I have already been living together for some time which we consider a bigger step. And we haven't seen a whole lot of each other since the wedding, though we have spent the past week together. But really, we don't feel a lot different yet.

I bought a Sony DCR-HC24E for the purposes of recording my wedding ceremony. I could have borrowed my parents', but it's an ancient analogue thing and although I don't really have a use for a camcorder I talked it through with Katherine (making it clear that part of the appeal was just sheer toy value) and we went ahead with it.

(I should point out the driver for recording any of the wedding came from my mother-in-law and I wasn't that fussed about the whole thing, but having experienced the "day was a blur" thing I'm glad we have it. Though I've watched it too many times as I'm about to explain.)

The Sony comes with both USB and Firewire. My desktop doesn't do Firewire, but I figured USB would be fine. First issue is that Linux doesn't seem to support it in USB mode. I don't know if this is easily solved, as reading the manual I discovered that Sony claim USB isn't as good quality and Firewire is better. Huh? It's all digital. What gives? The best I could come up with is that Firewire is better at guaranteeing latency/bandwidth so you don't end up with dropped frames.

Anyway. I buy a Firewire cable and dig out a Via EPIA-M board which has Firewire. Some poking about leads me to the conclusion that I want dvgrab. I fire it up, it seems to do the right thing, I end up with a huge file. Point mplayer at it and discover it's dropping frames. It appears raw DV is about 30Mb/s. The HD in the Via is an old 6GB one that only does ATA-33. So I find a newer ATA-133 capable one, double the RAM in the box (on Adam's recommendation) and try again. This goes better.

So now I have a bunch of AVI files, all of them about 1G in size. avimerge is employed to combine them (I might have been able to just get dvgrab to output a big file, but I was wary of large file support). Then I did ffmpeg -i bigfile.avi -target dvd smallerfile.mpg resulting in a couple of DVD format MPEGs (one for the ceremony, one for the speeches).

My first attempt at a DVD image was with DeVeDe. It seemed to work fine, but I ended up with something that the DVD player didn't like and neither did mplayer or xine. So I fell back to qdvdauthor, which I've used in the past but don't deem the most user friendly of programs. I finally end up with something that mplayer and xine seem happy with in terms of a menu and a pretty picture of us signing the register and working video.

And so to burning a DVD. I used growisofs for this. Firstly with a DVD-R, which mostly worked but had annoying pauses on my real DVD player. So I tried with a DVD+R and this seems to be much better, however there are some minor pauses. This might be my ancient DVD player not coping well I guess.

I'm sure DVD creation shouldn't be this painful. I bet if I ran Windows I could point and drool my way to a DVD with the software Sony supply with the camcorder. All I wanted was a basic menu with a background picture and some video attached to the menu options. I'm pondering doing a version with a picture gallery as well, but can I be bothered with the hassle?

I am totally married, dudes!

Well, I've survived my stag weekend. I did have some fears I might not. TFM did a great job of arranging it; 15 of us ended up in 2 cottages at Park Farm Barns (most of us for Friday and Saturday, with a handful of us there until today). Paintball was played at Skirmish. Much meat was eaten (possibly the largest piece of beef I've seen up close). Much alcohol was consumed. And my arteries are going to take a while to recover from 3 mornings in a row of fried bacon for breakfast. All good though. Thanks to everyone who managed to make it.

So I need to get a wedding ring. Given I hope to wear it for the next 50+ years and that I've worn a ring in the past I figured something more interesting than a plain band would be nice. Many years ago Kathy bought me a silver Celtic style ring I was fond of, but unfortunately I lost it a while ago, which was upsetting, so I thought it would be nice to get a wedding ring that was similar to the lost ring.

However. I don't like gold. So the logical choice seemed to be white gold. Until a jeweller told me that it was plated which would wear over time and require replating every few years. Which is a bit offputting. Anyone any experience of this? I've seen mention of getting it replated with a thicker than normal coating, which makes it less likely to require regular updating?

The other options seem to be silver or platinum. Does anyone have silver wedding rings? Does it last well enough? It's a lot cheaper; is that the only reason why they're not common or is there something more fundemental? Platinum is more expensive than white gold, but that's not a huge issue for the last ring I plan to wear. Is it harder to work though, making it less likely that I'll find what I want?

I found a ring at Ortak that I like, but no platinum option and I'd want to see it before buying, so online is out. Can anyone suggest a decent jeweller to talk to in Norwich? I've had a look around but not seen anything matching what I want. Alternatively I guess I can look in London.

Kathy and I went to Norwich Register Office yesterday to confirm the date for our wedding and show them our various documents (proof of age, address etc). All very scary, especially the way it seemed to be a test to about whether we knew each other or not (checking about middle names, age, whether we'd been married before with each of us while the other was out of the room). I mean, it's still months off, it's not like we're rushing into this. And the proof of address was our council tax bill with both our names on it.

Anyway. It looks like we're actually really going to get married. Gulp.

Kathy and I went out for dinner last night at Tootsies with Becca, Dave, Eli, J, Kaz and Will. It was a good night (even if the girls beat us at Cranium), but I found myself having to stop talking about weddings - I could see J and Kaz starting to glaze over early in the evening. This a frightening event. Is this how people become baby bores?

Anyway. Kathy and I managed to look at a couple of potential venues yesterday and have another one arranged for next Sunday, and a few more to ring this week to hopefully see next weekend. It's all still very scary.