metapaso.com blog

My dear friend Renzo has been in town for a few days, on loan to us from his job in the math department at University of Michigan. Renzo is on a job-hunting and speaking tour in the final year of his post-doc, looking for a tenure-track position at a number of universities. The University of Western Ontario in London is interviewing him tomorrow, and I’m sure they’ll find him a great addition to their staff. I’m not sure about the photo. I don’t know him to have a birthmark, so I assume that’s water on his face, or perhaps war paint.

Here’s my video from the Recent Octopus Project I: Pink Octopus show.

The video shows clips and photos from our recent trip through Mexico narrated by me in a monologue about beachcombing.

The Baja beach portion of our trip finally came to a close. Ten full days of sunshine, an occasional break from the wind to catch fish or go snorkeling, hikes into the canyons on foot and mule-back, and we had relaxed and recharged, ready to move on to La Paz and from there to the Mexican mainland. The only trouble was getting from our lonely beachside outpost, up the 20-mile dirt road to the Baja Highway 1 where we could catch a bus.

I thought it might be nice for other Dell X1 users to see my screen spanning configuration. These xorg.conf files have been working for me in Feisty (7.04) and Gutsy (7.10). These xorg.conf files are a result of using howtos on a bunch of sites, not limited to: Ubuntu Dual Monitors Forum and more explicitly, the Xinerama Howto
My system is:

• Dell Latitude X1
• 768MB RAM
• 80GB internal Drive: 40GB ntfs / 30GB ext3 / 512MB swap
• Intel 915 built-in graphics chipset
• Dell 1280×768 widescreen monitor (Built-in on laptop)
• External Monitor is Samsung SyncMaster 151v 1024×768

So for an investment of a thousand miles of driving and two weeks of on-the-road and camping adventure, we had two good days of weather in Bella Coola, the first on the day we arrived, and the second yesterday on our trip to the Hot Springs of South Bentick.

Today, Saturday, broke with rain on my tent yet again, and we decided to pack it in, call it a day, call it a trip, and head for home. Lucky we did, too, because the top of the pass heading east from Bella Coola was starting to get snowed and nasty. My first taste of winter. And only September!