Firstly I would like to thank both Hewlett Packard and Ivy Worldwide for getting me out here and helping me avoid going to work for nearly two weeks. (Partial credit to Prince William too)

So I landed in Madrid late last night, utterly failing my mission of going paperless having waved my phone at the parking attendants and check-in clerks and receiving a handful of papers back instead. At least I tried to be green.

I arrived a little late for the casual dinner with the other attendees so I decided to eat in the hotel bar picking out the only item I recognised a cheeseburger, I hope to sample other Spanish delicacies in the coming days.

I am here with these fellow bloggers: @paulmiller @martinmacleod @hvredevoort and @HPConvergeIT

Today is considered the business day and started at 10am with the HP keynote covering whats HP has been doing to push their converged technology forwards and a few real examples of where it had been deployed....

So before I start I would like to thanks Ivy Worldwide for inviting me out to Tech Ed Europe here in Berlin, with a special thanks to Terri Stratton and Megan Link from Waggener Edstrom for sorting out the last minute complications and generally making this all possible.

What is also interesting though lacking sentiment is the fact that this is the first time I have been in Germany since I was actually born here at a British Hospital nearly thirty years ago. So that was lovely.

Tech Ed generally isn’t typically the kind of conference I would attend as it is very much geared towards developers and various aspects of large scale enterprises businesses, with generally very little consumer action but fortunately Microsoft did recently launch a new mobile platform you might have heard of and were very eager to show it off.

In the main Microsoft hall there was a stand allowing people to play with various Windows Phones with all three European HTC devices...

So one of the things I have noticed while making many of the changes to OSNN over the last few weeks if the quality of the adverts.

Giving the users the option to subscribe and hide all adverts is far too tempting to not include myself so I honestly won't see them all that often. However, as I have been working on the site I have not only had them enabled for my various test accounts but been fairly disgusted at how bad they are.

Every other advert seems to be about how some house wife has discovered the ultimate way to make her teeth whiter and while I briefly found this fairly interesting, my attention was not held.

Now that the various ad blocks have near enough been finalized I am going to try and work towards making cooler and more relevant adverts.

The current OSNN adverts:
...

If you have been waiting for more information on my fish tank, then tonight your dreams will become true. To everyone else, I have fish. Obviously the meer existence of such a blog means I am avoiding doing something else, but I promise I will do that next! You are not the boss of me!




So firstly I am sad to report some deaths in the community! One of the algae eaters and both Firemouths died sadly, I think the firemouths were rather prone to infections and although I tried my best, they seemed to get weak and die. It was at different times and the second clearly had an infection which seemed to be going away after treatment but it suddenly became very clear I would be removing it from the tank the following morning.

I didn't buy any new fish for quite some time, last week actually. The remaining fish are getting quite big so I was very hesistant to put more in - there is plenty of room but you alwas want to give them their space especially...

So the longer term members will have noticed that over the last year or so and a gradual decline before that I hadn’t been playing a large part in the OSNN community and I just wanted to go over what I have been up to.

I guess part of it stemmed from the pressure to redesign the site which would have meant skinning and tweaking two separate systems. When I came home from work at night I really just wanted to chill out and enjoy myself. The Virtuanews system was an interest project, but hard work to skin with almost all page elements being spaced out in different yet similar templates. With the collapse of its own site and no real design community it got harder and harder to maintain it as vBulletin continued to change.

Regardless, I was looking for a new style but never really found anything. I met a girl and she became my everything, nothing else mattered. I wanted to be with her all the time and that was perhaps too much because a year and a half later...