Our Life Down Under

My friend Jon emailed me a few days ago and asked how I’d been able to stream my wedding live on the Internet last year. I thought I’d layout the way I did it here, because I have a feeling it won’t be the last time someone asks me and I can just point them here to this post.

I used an iPhone to do this but it should work with an Android phone too. You will need a few things to make this all possible, they are:

• A good 3G or Wi-Fi connection at the church or reception room. Best to visit the church/venue before the big day and test the quality of the connection. If you can’t get at least a good 3G connection, your dead in the water.

• The uStream or Justin TV iPhone apps. I used uStream but that’s just my preference (and now Charlie Sheen’s too apparently).

• An account with uStream or Justin TV (which ever one you’ve chosen).

• A website to embed the video on. This step is optional. You could just direct your viewers to the uStream or Justin TV page of your video (and that’s the easiest option). But I chose to embed the video stream on this website and direct people to it’s page here.

  

If you don’t have a website to embed the video on you could set up a quick blog at Tumblr. This is what I’ve chosen to do when I try to do this again for a friend of mine in New Zealand in March.

The last thing I would recommend getting, is a good stand/mount for the phone to sit in and hold it steady during the ceremony, and in a good position. The one I’ll be using in march is the Spiderpodium. Also if you can plug the phone in, you won’t have to worry about the battery running out 25 minutes into the ceremony like my old iPhone 3G did last year.

When the stream is about to start send out a Facebook message and/or a Twitter message with links to the stream and watch the viewers pour in.

So that’s a quick and very rough guide covering the apps and methods I used to successfully stream my wedding last year. We had over a hundred viewers around the world that were able to watch our wedding in Ireland that would otherwise have missed it.

Another good example of why I love my iPhone.

The Brisbane river has broken its banks now.

You’ve probably seen the floods on the news by now.

So far we are ok here in Algester, but the flooding is beginning to creep closer to us as the Brisbane river gets closer to bursting its banks.

The Wivenhoe Dam was built in the aftermath of a huge flood in 1974 as Brisbane’s defense against another major flood. Its currently at 173% full. 100% is the normal ideal capacity for drinking water, it has a 100% extra space for overflow, so at 200% it will start to overflow and then we are in trouble. To give you an idea of how fast its filling it was 140% full 48 hours ago.

A few blokes here at work have gone home early (its 10am at the moment) after hearing that there houses under water. The roads are being closed around us and it doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing the end of it for quite a while.

I’ll be updating here and via Twitter and Facebook to let you know how we are doing. Our house itself I think should be fine, its reasonably high up. It maybe a day or two before this suburb is hit with the worst of it though.

Our little Gracie

Our good friend Sinead put this slide-show together for us after the wedding. We thought we’d share it here.