Wedding 2.0

The wedding invites have started landing on people's doormats today. I've borrowed the title of this post from one recipient, who emailed me to amusedly point out that this wedding uses virtually every Web 2.0 service there is.

I hadn't really thought about it, but yeah, guilty as charged. :-)

We used web applications quite a bit...

The photograph on the invite cards (see above) was imagined by Jane, photographed by me, uploaded to Flickr and printed by Moo. The information sheet inside includes a link to a custom Google Map showing the locations of all the venues and local hotels, written as a succinct TinyURL, as Google Map permalinks are a bit too long to type in!

Some people even get a little Moo sticker of the same design on the back of the envelope!

The wedding gift list is also available online, if guests want to partake, via John Lewis's Gift List system. Which took a lot of the stress out of the whole thing... well, for me and Jane anyway!

Behind the scenes, Jane and I have also made heavy use of Google's services, including Google Calendar to keep track of what needs doing when (or, more often, who needs paying when!), and there's a spreadsheet on Google Docs that's keeping a record of the list of attendees, the budget, and more!

I'm a great believer in not using "technology for technology's sake", which might sound a bit unusual coming from someone who's bread and butter is in computing. But I think when you work in IT, and regularly come across people trying to force technological solutions to problems that don't need them, you inevitably become a bit of a technology agnostic. Part of my job is saying to people "are you sure you wouldn't be better off writing this on a scrap of paper?".

I'm quite happy writing stuff on a scrap of paper when it's quicker than firing up a spreadsheet, but in this case I think that it's been very worthwhile making use of the techologies available. Putting the wedding budget online, for example, has meant that I can tinker with it during lunchtimes at work. Both Jane and I have access to it from more or less anywhere, without having to carry around a dog-eared bits of paper like Norfolk's answer to Earl Hickey.

On the day, we're doing without the services of a professional photographer (the budget wouldn't stretch), and relying on guests to share any pictures they take via a Flickr group created for the purpose.

Which reminds me, we need to make some cards with the details of the Flickr group to hand out to guests on the day ... back to Moo!

An Atom feed of Jane and Simon's wedding is available at: www.oknowyouregoingtofar.com

Get away

The wedding, while not extravagant by any standards, still seems to consist of a thousand things that need organising.

We're getting there, slowly but surely. The shape of it is more-or-less planned out, we now need to just go back and fill in the fine details.

One big thing that wasn't organised until tonight was the getting-away-afterwards bit. We had some vague criteria: we wanted something lazy and beach-based (which meant far enough south to still be warm in early November), somewhere we'd both not been before (which, between us, rules out a fair proportion of Europe and elsewhere), it had to be for a couple of weeks, and it had not to break the bank.

Tonight we narrowed it down to the Canaries, and eventually the southern tip of Fuerteventura. We just had to find a suitable travel company to book through.

I always find that the most stressful part of booking holidays. All the online travel agents seem to have their own way of doing things. Every site seems to have it's own unique set of criteria before it will even begin to suggest holidays to you. And then you have to play the "price that it says compared to the price it actually is" game.

You fill in all your criteria, tell it your budget, click the "find holidays" button and a screen appears:

"Finding your ideal holiday... please wait!"

Which actually means "making a list of all the places we've not managed to fill yet and desperately want to flog, and then sticking a random number next to it which bears no relation to the actual price of the holiday when you take into account Fuel Tax, Bed Tax, Window Tax, and a surcharge that changes the price from what initially appeared to be some kind of fantasy once-in-a-lifetime bargain which would have in reality made us bankrupt into the kind of figure we'd actually make a profit on... please wait!"

And then when you do find a decent holiday, you find that you can only take it if you're willing to travel from Lerwick airport, or as seemed to be the case with all the holidays we found, only flew out on a Wednesday. Which would have left us twiddling our thumbs for 3 days because we'd stupidly booked our wedding for a Saturday, not realising that the travel market isn't really geared up for couples wanting to go away on holiday just after they get married. You'd think there'd be a market for it, maybe even a special word for that type of holiday!

In the end, in slight desperation, I chucked all our details into Expedia, fully expecting it to also draw a blank. But amazingingly it chucked out just what we wanted: 13 nights in a nice resort for well within our budget. Fantastic!

So now we're all booked, one less thing to worry about, and because I've more-or-less sorted it myself without recourse to a package operator, I can confort myself that we'll be travellers, not "holidaymakers".

Well, actually we'll be honeymooners... Honeymoon! I knew there was a word for it!

The Uncle Bob Question

It's one of the topics of conversation surrounding The Wedding.

I imagine that almost every family has an Uncle Bob. My Uncle Bob is the stuff of legend. But, to fully describe him, I'd better start at the beginning.

His name's not really Bob, I've changed it, in some half-assed attempt to assuage the guilt I'm feeling about relentlessly mocking him in the following blog post.

Uncle Bob married into my mum's side of the family about twenty years ago. My dad enjoys recounting the tale of the time he first met him, at some kind of "welcome to the family" get-together.

He decided to break the ice with "so Bob, what do you do for a living?"

"I take an empty sack... and put it under a chute... and when the sack is full I put it onto the truck."

Now... at this point I should say that my Dad is not snobbish about occupations. He's done some pretty working-class jobs himself in his time, so he wasn't humouring Bob when he inquired...

"What's in the sacks?"

Blank look.

"... I don't know."

My dad's a lot like me (not in that way, he was a lumberjack, and he's okay, but the dressing up in suspendies and a bra skipped a generation), and my brain works a lot like his brain. So I can imagine the abject terror he must have felt when he realised I've got to continue to navigate this conversation without laughing.

For all my Uncle Bob knew, he could be carting about toxic waste in those sacks. British Nuclear Fuels would probably pay good money for a worker like Bob. "Just take the glowy stick-type things and drop them down that big bottomless shafty-type thing until you start feeling a bit hot and bothered, thanks!"

It hadn't occurred to him to ask his employers what was in the sacks. That was beyond what was required to do his job.

Although, thinking about it, the fact that he worked for a malt factory should have been a big clue.

Uncle Bob kept budgies. Uncle Bob likes Country and Western. A lot. His idea of the height of sartorial elegance was a full Rhinestone Cowboy outfit. And not just for special occasions.

My family is pretty spread out. In fact, by Norfolk standards, we're practically a diaspora. So Uncle Bob and his wife (which would be my Aunt... do try to keep up!) were the only relatives of mine who lived in the town where I went to High school. This was fine while I was safely locked away inside the school during the first to fifth years. However, in the Sixth Form we were allowed out at lunchtimes to terrorise the town's cake shops and newsagents.

Then Uncle Bob became a real problem.

I'd be hanging out next to the War Memorial, trying to look and sound as cool as my friends (trying being the ever-operative word) when...

"Isn't that your uncle behind you Simon?"

I'd look round, and there he was, his grin nearly as wide as his stetson. Texas belt buckle gleaming in the East Anglian sunshine. Radiating uncoolness like a glowy stick-type thing.

"Hello boy!!"

Groan. "Hello Uncle Bob."

You know those poor kids who had parents who were teachers at the same school? Even those kids felt sorry for me.

One day, we were walking back to school at the end of lunch when I espied Uncle Bob and my aunt heading towards us. To my surprise they were pushing a pram.

I guess they were both in their late forties at this time, but that doesn't really excuse my first thought: oh my god... he's bred!

"Isn't that your Uncle Bob, Simon?" one of my mates helpfully pointed out.

"Yes... should we just cross ove..."

"Hello Simon's Uncle Bob!"

"Hello boys!!!"

"Er, hi Uncle," I said. "I didn't even know you two were expecting..."

"Oh no," he said, giving us a conspiratorial wink. "It's not a baby."

He lifted the blanket, underneath half a dozen tiny little puppies blinked at us.

"Vet says they're not supposed to be out of the house yet. Might catch germs and that," he explained. "But we had the pram so I thought..."

"You thought you'd push a pram full of puppies through the town centre... whilst in full cowboy gear."

"Yep!"

...

So yeah, back to the Question. Should Uncle Bob be invited to the wedding reception? It's an open vote.

I fully expect you to all vote "yes" about twice over, because I know you're all evil bastards! :-)