Stefano and Anna's last competition together in Blackpool

Every competitive dancer awaits the last week of May for the Blackpool Dance Festival. This is where the biggest and the best fight it out on the dancefloor for the coveted British Open Championship title. With Carmen and Bryan retiring last year before blackpool, Michael Malitowski and Joanna Leunis have become the couple to defeat when they won last year’s Blackpool Professional Latin Championship.

Well the polish couple (in an expected outcome) defended their titles becoming Blackpool champions for the 2nd time around. Riccardo Cocci and Yulia Zagorouitchenko is again at number 2 over all but placing first during the Jive Round (GO RULIA!). With Peter and Kristine Stokkebroe taking a leave of absence from the dancing world as Kristina expects their first baby, Franco Formica and Oxana Lebedew have replaced them in the bronze position. I was afraid that Sergey and Melia would take the third this time without them (I’m sorry I really dont like Melia, she has the worst technique I swear just my opinion). Crowd favorites when they we’re amateurs, Maurizio Vescovo and Melinda Törökgyorgy are at number 5. Sadly Eugene Katsevman and Maria Manusova didn’t make it to any of the Finals this year (they made it to the Jive finals last time), their still my favorite couple though.

In the Amateur Category, my idols, Stefano Di Filippo and Anna Melnikova won the Amateur Latin title by winning in all 5 dances (god this couple is unbeatable). What was unexpected though was the tie between Croatian couple Zoran Phlol &  Tatsiana Lavinovich and Alexei Silde and Anna Firstova from Russia. Special rules we’re used to determine the 2nd place and it eventually went to Zoran and Tatsiana. Personally I’ve always liked this couple  though their routines tend to have to many tricks and not enough basic figures but I think its about time judges gave them a higher ranking (I wonder when will they ever turn pro).

In a twisted turn of events, after winning the Amateur Latin championship title, Stefano and Anna announced the end of their partnership (WHY OH WHY) and Anna announced she would be dancing with a new partner (could she be Slavik’s new partner?). I really hate it when absolutely great partnerships end at the top of their prime, Stefano and Anna won every major competition they went to in 2008 including the coveted IDSF World Latin Championships in Australia (making them number 1 in the world). Its sad specially when I was just about to make a fanlisting/shrine to them -_-.

My own personal solution to this for people who like the idea of keeping a private journal but aren’t used to handwriting long entries anymore. The solution is MAMP and Wordpress. MAMP gives you an easy way to install MySQL APACHE and PHP for your Mac. Once you have MAMP installed you can then simply create a database for your wordpress and install wordpress. You get to blog and rant but still within the comfort and limits of your computer. Your website should only be accessible from your computer or your home network and with simple changes in the port settings you can require visitors (if you want visitors) to enter a password before being able to view any of part of your blog/site

So far, all of the problems I had with my installation have been fixed. I haven’t seen any other bug problems but let’s just wait and see what happens next.

I have been a very big fan of Becca’s designs for such a long time and her blog offers a lot of good designer information and fun reads. Becca was actually nice enough to introduce me to what image replacement was (this was last year) when I was wondering how she made her blog title into a stylized image.

Her last entry was in late June last year which was about aethism and I haven’t seen any activity from her since. Does anyone know where the great Becca Wei is? What has happened? Becca the blog world needs you!

The problems I had with the editor was that it wasn’t displaying the style buttons in visual mode and it wouldn’t show the text box at all when you would switch to HTML mode. After searching through the wp support forums, I found this post which offered a number of solutions to the different visual editor problems the main solution being the Tiny MCE Advanced plugin by Andrew Ozz.

Here is a screen shot of my visual editor after installing the plugin.

A funny thing happened though when I deactivated the plugin. Instead of going back to it’s previous state where the editor would break when switching modes, it remained functional. The only differences were the loss of certain styling elements namely the font size, superscript, subscript, insert/edit attributes, print and smilies. Though these functions were lost the blockquote button were added (I think this is part of the “default” functions for wp) as well as the buttons for google videos and youtube videos which are part of the Viper’s Video quicktags.

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Here is an ordered list of the things I did for those who need a simple how to.

1. re-upload wp-admin and wp-includes (delete first then upload)
2. Upload Tiny MCE
3. Activate Tiny MCE (didn’t work)
4. Deactivate Tiny MCE
5. upload Tiny MCE advanced
6. Activate Tiny MCE advanced
7. clear browser cache