This was however one of the most enjoyable competitions I’ve done as I didn’t get as nervous whilst on the ice (I was still very nervous before stepping on the ice though).  I nearly fell on Salchow Loop but didn’t and more importantly didn’t let it spoil the rest of the performance as I remained calm throughout… although I’m not sure I was breathing whilst skating!

Photographs coming soon…

I was the only person within my category and consequently won 1st place despite falling on my Flip jump.  However it was a fun competition, made all the more so by all the support from the crowd of Coventry skaters of all ages (and their parents) when I fell on my Flip jump.  The photo on the podium was taken quickly in between me teaching Learn to Skate Classes after the competition.

Accompanied by my coach, and supported by a number of other skaters from Coventry and Cannock I performed my programme on Blackpool’s Ice Rink which is much smaller than I’m used to.  With my long legs and a habit for skating quickly this proved to be more of a challenge than I’d expected.

My sincere thanks go to all the Coventry & Cannock skaters that cheered me on during my programme and also for the gifts that were thrown onto the ice when I finished my programme.  Thank you all this was a really nice surprise and very much appreciated!

Sadly no photographs of the performance exist.  However below are a couple of pictures taken immediately after the competition in a studio set up in the rink.

The nice touch was that the men’s categories received medals with the image of a male skater.  A photo of this will be added shortly, a picture of the very large cup can be found below.

My programme was changed shortly before the competition in order to meet the requirements of the Bronze category event and to reflect some of the jumps I’d been learning recently.  Salchow Loop jump was always a challenge and unfortunately it didn’t quite go right on the day.  I also forgot part of my step sequence, but most annoyingly messed up my first spin.  However I may be being too hard on myself as my marks were good compared to other skaters.

The competition was followed by a Skate Camp in the afternoon which was both challenging and enjoyable.

Donal MacIntyre, who continues to skate following his appearance on Dancing on Ice, performed the presentations.

The competition was well organised and I enjoyed the day, especially as I won the Pre-Bronze category.

Apache ran fine, and MySQL, PHPMyAdmin and PHP5 were all installed and working correctly.  However it was not possible to place a web site into a folder location within my /home/myuser/www folder.

The steps to solve this were actually very simple:

1 – create the www folder and create a dummy index.htm page to test the site with.

2 – Create a new Virtual Host by using terminal to issue the following commands – changing your site name and user folder as necessary.

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysite

gksudo gedit /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysite

change DocumentRoot line point to /home/myuser/www

change Directory line to point to /home/myuser/www

3 -  Ensure the user account folder can be accessed by Apache by changing the permissions.

chmod +x /home/myuser

4 – Secure Apache

gksudo gedit /etc/apache2/ports.conf

change the Listen line to read

Listen 127.0.0.1:80

5 – Enable your new site usinge:

sudo a2ensite mysite

6 – Change folder permissions to ensure the home folder and the user home folder can be browsed by other users, else Apache will return messages about files not found.

7 - Restart Apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

8 - Test your new site http://localhost/

A list of netbooks supported and known issues can be found here – https://wiki.ubuntu.com/HardwareSupport/Machines/Netbooks

Download Ubuntu 9.04 NBR from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download-netbook