Barbados

Trip Photos

Our annual escape to the Caribbean brought us to Barbados for two weeks this year. Barbados is nicknamed "Little England," and one can't argue. Our resort served afternoon tea everyday. Cricket matches took place around the island (we attended one). People were polite without being too friendly. A large percentage of the residents are of British background. Mix in the thousands of tourists from the UK, it really felt like England except for the endless sun, the heat, the tall palms and the tanned bodies everywhere.

Barbados is favoured by hawksbill sea turtles. On one of my snorkelling trips, we were taken to a turtle hotspot, but I had a suspicion that those turtles were not wild because they had tags on their front legs. One day, while boogie-boarding off our hotel beach, I saw a sea turtle swimming close to shore. It almost looked like he was playing in the waves as the tide came in the evening. I ran back to the room to fetch my snorkelling gear, and jumped into the water after him. Because the waves were strong, the sand was kicked up, making it difficult to see underwater. To my surprise, there were schools of fish drifting patiently in shallow water, only metres away from the edge. Did this mean that when I was swimming or boogie-boarding in the water, these fish were only inches away from my toes? They were translucent, not colourful like the typical tropical fish. I swam around for a while, and suddenly, there he was, relaxing at the bottom, my friend the turtle! He was huge, about four feet long, three feet wide. After a while, his cute little legs started moving, and he swam this way and that. From time to time, he'd come up for air, and let himself be picked up by a big wave. I followed him a foot or two behind for twenty minutes, then out of the blue, he made an abrupt 180 turn. So there I was, face to face with a sea turtle whose beady eyes were staring straight at me. It was so funny! For almost a week until we left, I stalked my turtle friend in the evening. Unless he was feeding on invisible fish, I gather he was just there to play in the waves.

Our resort being on the south edge of the island means fairly high waves, which in turn means good conditions for surfing but lousy ones for snorkelling. The west side of the island has good snorkelling spots, including one only a short swim away from shore. I boogie-boarded everyday, but it was not as easy as it looked. Occasionally, I'd catch a good wave, but most of the time, it was much waiting followed by furious kicking of the legs only to end on a whimper with no excitement. Nevertheless, surfing must be a highly addictive activity. I was not discouraged by my failures. Hour after hour, I paddled on the board, measuring the waves, always hoping: the next one is going to be the perfect one...

For three days, we rented a little car to explore the other parts of the island. The east side is prettier because of the rough tides and rugged cliffs and rocks. It's also quieter as it has only a few hotels and resorts. The west side is the ritzy part. Tiger Woods got married at one of the top establishments there. Driving was on the "wrong side" again, which was fine because in the last few years, we had had to drive on the left several times (in St. Lucia, Australia, New Zealand, and England). The roads in Barbados are in much better shape than those on the other Caribbean islands that we've been to, but once in the mountains, everyone gets lost sooner or later. Fortunately, it doesn't take long before one finds one's way again.

We played tennis lots. Like on all islands, there is a strong breeze to contend with. The heat and humidity also sapped energy out of me so quickly that I found myself huffing and puffing in no time. Once as we walked onto the court, we discovered a green monkey sitting near the net. He was rather frightened by us, and very carefully took a roundabout route to leave the court. In all my years of playing tennis, I'd never had a monkey spectator before.

I'd imagined it boring to spend two weeks at a beach resort. To my surprise, the days went by, and before I knew it, it was time to pack for home. Barbados is really a very nice place, certainly the most prosperous and sophisticated compared to the Caribbean islands from our previous trips. I'd love to return someday.

Ubuntu

I've been using UNIX since 1990. A few years later, I joined the Red Hat Linux world. Over time, I've played with other Linux distributions: SuSE, Mandrake, etc., but Red Hat, which later morphed into Fedora, was my distro of choice.

A few days ago, in the process of upgrading my existing Fedora set, I ran into some problems, and decided to give Ubuntu a try. Am I glad I did. Everything is nicer about Ubuntu. The Wireless Network Manager is a particularly useful addition. All went well, and I had myself a spanking new Linux OS all set up -- except for the display. For some reason, even though my monitor is capable of up to 1280x1024, I was stuck with the painfully low resolution of 800x600.

After much poking around on the Net looking for answers, and trying nVidia's own driver for Linux (which didn't work at all as the driver causes the whole system to freeze), I noticed some entries in /var/log/Xorg.0.log:

(II) NV(0): VG800-2: Using default hsync range of 31.50-37.90 kHz
(II) NV(0): VG800-2: Using default vrefresh range of 50.00-70.00 Hz
(II) NV(0): Clock range: 12.00 to 350.00 MHz
[...]
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode "640x350" (vrefresh out of range)
[...]
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode "1024x768" (bad mode
clock/interlace/doublescan)
[...]
(II) NV(0): Not using default mode "1024x768" (hsync out of range)
[...]
(**) NV(0): *Default mode "800x600": 40.0 MHz, 37.9 kHz, 60.3 Hz

I know my monitor supports an hsync range of 30-82 kHz, and a vrefresh range of 50-75 Hz. It turns out that sometimes, the built-in driver for the video card has trouble obtaining these hardware values. One solution is to feed the values to the driver by adding in Xorg.conf these lines:

Option "HorizSync" "30-82"
Option "VertRefresh" "50-75"

A Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X, but still, I got the 800x600 low resolution. This time, Xorg.0.log contained:

(WW) NV(0): Option "HorizSync" is not used
(WW) NV(0): Option "VertRefresh" is not used

Why not?! More searching on the web pointed out that in xorg.conf, I must use:

HorizSync 30-82
VertRefresh 50-75

I.e. without "Option" and the quotes. Now I did a Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to restart X, and voila! high resolution!!