It's 7:25 AM. Andy and I are hoping to make a whistle-stop trip to the Cathedral before making it to the conference early enough to get good seats for the keynote. I thought I'd take a picture of the conference pack, especially since I've heard grumblings about the PDC bag. The TechEd pack looks pretty much identical …

Ola! Andy and I are now in sunny Espana. Only it's not sunny. Oh well... However, true to form we started our trip, having registered at the conference centre, by eating hot dogs in a german fast food joint in a Spanish shopping centre! If you're passing, Kurz & Gut does pretty good food. I'm also extremely …

Andy and I are travelling to Barcelona this weekend for TechEd EMEA IT. I’m really looking forward to some of the sessions on Hyper-V, SharePoint and Forefront.If you’re going to be there, feel free to drop us a line and say hi.

I don’t visit the Mix community site often – historically, the content has been of little interest and infrequently updated. Imagine my surprise, then, to find a relaunched Mix Online with a new Microformats project – Oomph. In short, it’s cool – a microformats extension for IE plus other goodies to help implement …

Flush with my success earlier in getting apps installed on the SD card now mounted as 'c:SD Program Files' I installed a few things. I then hit a snag. When you install apps using an MSI, the installation files get cached by Windows Installer. Steadily, c:windowsinstaller gets bigger and bigger, so whilst my apps were …

I’m still trying new things with the Mini 9. I now have an image file that I can restore to the Mini which has my base install after running sysprep. The problem I have is storage space – the SSD isn’t quite big enough. So, Richard wandered in this morning and handed me a 4Gb SD card to experiment with. The question: …

I've been chipping away at this for a while now today, and I've learned a few things on the way: When Vista says it suggests installing the battery drivers for the system, don't. The zip file it suggested I install broke power management. Patch the system fully as an admin user before logging in as a restricted user. …

Our second Mini 9 arrived in the office today. This one is for Andy and myself to use whilst out of the office. Richard has successfully upgraded his to XP Professional, so we had to try to push the bar out a little further – we’re running Vista Business. I have not spent any time tweaking or prodding yet. I used …

You can’t say that things never change. I nipped out to Tesco last night for a few bits of shopping – you know, some beer, spices for cooking, etc – and came back with an Acer Aspire One. As you do… To be fair, I have been looking at them closely, and Tesco are by far the cheapest place to get one. I picked up the 1Gb …

Colour me impressed. I managed well over four hours’ battery life today and found the Mini 9 a joy to use. I have encountered a snag, however, and it wasn’t one that I expected. You see, I’m now sitting on the 21:30 train from London Kings Cross to Wakefield after having been in the big smoke for a day of meetings. I …