One of the many lovely traditions associated with weddings is that of the stag do – a chance for the men to be manly without any girls. With a best man like James, I knew that he wouldn’t allow for any girlishness and he didn’t disappoint.

Now I know it’s not traditional to share what goes on at a stag do, but what I will share is that it was better than I could have imagined. It was bushcraft weekend including making a shelter, gathering firewood, skinning and gutting a rabbit, making fire with flint and steel, making fire with a bow, cooking and eating said rabbits, cooking and eating mealworms (I now accept that I need more insects in my diet) as well as a lovely pub meal, a few songs with a couple of guys from my uni barbershop group and a trip to church on the Sunday morning. One of the highlights was waking up at sunrise and looking out from the bivvy bag at the dew-soaked grass. Awesome! The down-side? Well, I ended up wearing clothes that I wouldn’t normally choose…but it’s alright – a nice lady at church said that her daughter wears wacky clothes like that normally!

Big, big thanks go to James and Richard for their fantastic organisation and to Nick for expertly and patiently teaching.

Thanks to our official wedding photographer, Tom Dauben for this lovely photo of me – which seems kind of appropriate for this upcoming weekend too!

If you wish to see further photos of me in my “natural” attire, there is a gallery of stag do photos – thanks to Tim Wakeling and Dad for these photos.

As all good wedding planners do, we picked a venue for our marriage service then invited too many guests to fit in it. That’s not what good wedding planners do? Oh. Oops. Actually, it wasn’t quite like that, but play along with us for now…! Basically, the situation is that we have loads of guests, a small village church and our reception venue next door. Rather than try to cram everyone into the church, we’ve decided to be a little geeky and set up a video link which I (Steve) thought would be relatively easy.

The general idea that I had was that we have a video camera in the church and a projector in the marquee in the wedding venue with “a link” between the two. Now in my mind that link could take one of two forms:

1. A cable directly between the camera and projector
2. A cable from camera into a laptop, then to another laptop attached to the projector, either via ethernet or a wireless link

Now the second option just sounded too complicated, so we did some de-risking with the first option and found out that in terms of cabling we could use video phono (analogue) or HDMI (digital). After getting some advice from Andrew Lipscombe, the guy who’s doing sound at our wedding (one might say it was sound advice…get it?!) he recommended we went with digital up to the projector to cut out interference, so we then had to work out how to make HDMI stretch 50 metres. If you’ve read up to here, you’re probably really interested, or really bored, so in either case I’ll throw in a picture of our plan:

The next thing was to get a projector that was powerful enough to show in a marquee and with this one I’ll cut the story short and say that basically our cheapest option was to buy a projector which we’ll then sell on afterwards (let us know if you’re in the market for an Optoma Ep782 DLP 4700 lumens projector in the Autumn…). We did have suggestions from certain friends that we should get one with a TV tuner so they could watch the paralympics instead of the wedding, but we think we’ll give that one a miss.

So, technologically, we should be sorted now…well, once we’ve got a screen. The one thing we have yet to work out is what to do if someone in the marquee knows of any reason in law why we shouldn’t be married…