When I say guide its more the steps I use to get a minimal system up and running, also its installed to a encrypted LVM.

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...

Ordered some Audio Technica ATH-M50's to repace my Sennheiser HD280 Pro headphones since the headband has been missing its plastic for some time and the leather head cushion is starting to wear. Phones themselves still sound great attached to my Xonar D2X.

If I remember I'll post what I think of the M50's on Monday when they arrive

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:
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