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Zhou Shen 周深 9.29Hz World Tour

Both my wife and I are Zhou Shen’s fans. We have been following him since 2019, just when we first started to follow Chinese media content. This is the same time when the Covid-19 pandemic hit. We watched a variety show called Our Song (我们的歌), and he was one of the many talented young singers.

Ever since I have been following his shows as well as listening to his songs. In December 2024 when he concluded his national tour in China, he announced that he would extend his tour to other countries. We were pretty excited but held our excitement in check because Toronto may not be one of the cities.

As it turned out, he will hold an event here in Toronto on March 14, 2025 (𝛑 day) at the Coca-Cola Coliseum!

Today is the actual date when tickets went on sale. Carol found the promotional code ZS929TO so that we can be eligible for presales at 1:00pm EST.

Many days before today I made sure my TicketMaster account was in order with all of my payment information all up to date. Twenty minutes before 1:00pm, I was signed on to the site and ready to order. I don’t know if it is luck or it was standard procedure, but 10 minutes before 1:00pm I decided to refresh the page. After the refresh, I was in the official queue!

We started out in the mid-5000’s and the above screenshot showed that it came down pretty fast, still we were pretty pessimistic about our chances. It took about 15 minutes for us to finally enter ticket sales and seat selections.

The seat selection process was also pretty difficult because every time we chose the seats, they were already taken. I finally just asked the system to give me the most expensive seats and was lucky enough to find two.

And… We Got Them! They were not cheap, but glad that we secured two tickets.

I double-checked that the tickets were recognized on the TicketMaster app on my iPhone, and added the tickets to my Apple Wallet. Can’t wait!

Retiring the Greenhouse

We have had a greenhouse in our backyard since the summer of 2015 (almost a decade ago). The greenhouse lasted much longer than we thought, given that it is just a thin aluminum structure with transparent plastic wall and roof sidings.

Greenhouse just before teardown

We are planning a sunroom extension and had to remove the greenhouse. This past Saturday, October 19, was the day marked for disassembly. A friend of mine agreed to disassemble the greenhouse and will later attempt to erect and reuse it on his property.

No more greenhouse!

New Found Love for LaTeX

In a previous post called, Scaled Solar System, I used \LaTeX for math equations. Recently I needed the ability to create a few documents that are mostly works in progress, and I wanted the ability to track the progress of these documents using git.

Traditional word processing tools like Google Docs or Microsoft Word are insufficient because tracking changes with Microsoft Word is simply too difficult to deal with.

Both my wife and I are about to travel to China in November and we had several disparate itineraries from various airlines, tour operators, hotels, and such. In the past, I usually used Microsoft Excel to create a combined itinerary. However, last year I tried to keep the combined itinerary in the iOS Notes App. Both solutions were less than ideal. Excel proved too difficult to edit on the go because I either had to use the mobile Excel app or open up my laptop. Once changes are made it would be difficult to track the changes that I made.

With the iOS Notes App, editing the cells within a table is okay for simple stuff, but for a complicated itinerary, the formatting capabilities simply did not exist. The tracking of changes was also an issue.

This time around, I am going to use \LaTeX. I have not used \LaTeX since I wrote my fourth-year thesis back at University of Toronto, that would be 33 years ago!

It took me some time to set up my Neovim environment for \LaTeX editing and previewing. The MacTeX package is an excellent all-in-one package for my Mac. After about a couple days, I was able to create a master itinerary with all the attached source itineraries, all delivered in a single PDF document. I am also able to create hyperlinks within the PDF so that I can jump to the source itinerary or booking information from the master itinerary entry.

The resulting PDF master itinerary has been very satisfactory. It was fulfilling to once again work with \LaTeX!

Bedroom Audio Setup

After watching the YouTube video below:

YouTube video that I watched
Playlist

I felt compelled to listen to my Bedroom audio system which I have not done for quite a while. I was pleasantly surprised by the musicality of the playlist that I quickly mustered for the night. I created the playlist on my old Mac mini 2018 using Apple Music configured for lossless music and USB output. On the other end of the USB is a Topping D90 DAC. My Q-Acoustic 3020i bookshelf speakers are powered by the S.M.S.L. DA-9 stereo amplifier.

With the acquisition of the S.M.SL. DA-9 stereo amplifier from my Winnipeg trip last year, and a freed, old Mac mini. I am able to swap out the old Raspberry Pi running Volumio as my streamer, and use the Mac mini instead. This way not only can I take advantage of Apple Music Loseless, but I can also install mpd to play my FLAC library. I still use the Rigelian App on both my Mac and iOS devices to control music from my mpd.

However to get the Mac mini working with my Topping D90 external DAC, I had to configure mpd appropriately. Below is a snippet of the mod configuration for audio_output. The configuration file is stored in ~/.mpd/mpd.conf.

audio_output {
          type            "osx"
          name            "D90 "
          device          "D90 " # optional
          mixer_type      "disabled"
          dop              "yes"
}

The following command can be used to obtain the detail of the USB audio devices that my Mac is aware of:

system_profiler SPAudioDataType

Note the extra trailing space of the D90 name.

Below are the pictures of the equipment and software of my stack.

My External DAC Topping D90
My Stereo Amplifier S.M.S.L DA-9
Q-Acoustics 3020i Bookshelf Speakers
I use the Rigelian App to control my music on mpd
All together now!

Vancouver Trip

On April 9th, 2024 both my wife and I hopped on a flight to Vancouver to visit some friends and family. I got an excellent deal from Expedia for TD paying $1035 CAD for 2 return trips and a rental SUV for the week. We ended up getting a fancy Nissan Rogue for the trip.

We did not do any sightseeing other than Port Moody. Our primary purpose while staying in the City of Vancouver is to sample the Chinese food in Vancouver. This means hanging out largely in Richmond and doing some dim sum.

On the fourth day of our trip, we took the BC Ferries to Vancouver Island, visiting Nanaimo for two days, and spending our final two days in Victoria. We finished the week-long trip by taking a return ferry to Tsawwassen terminal, which is close enough to Richmond for us to get another good Chinese B.B.Q pork meal at HK BBQ Master, which I highly recommend!

Our rough schedule looked something like this:

  • Day 1 – Fish & chips along with ice cream at Port Moody; visited Natalie’s beautiful home on the hills, and gave Zoey (her cat) a nice rub; and then to Burnaby to stay at our cousin’s place and got introduced to Maple our new, small canine friend;
  • Day 2 – Lunch, snacks & dinner in Richmond; love the pineapple bun with its tasty, thick, cold butter; savored the lamb served at Hao’s;
  • Day 3 – Dim sum at Kirin restaurant in New Westminister and catching up with Agnes; followed by dessert at La Foret Jubilee with Natalie joining us;
  • Day 4 – Ferry from Horseshoe Bay to Departure Bay at Nanaimo; did some hiking and scenery;
  • Day 5 – More scenery in Nanaimo and shopping at The Old Country Market at Coombs; What goat on the roof?
  • Day 6 – Drive to Victoria with a stop in Chemainus to inspect the murals, hike on the Kinsol Trestle bridge, with a late lunch at OEB Breakfast, and dinner at Finn’s;
  • Day 7 – Hiked the Beacon’s Hill Park with a huge breakfast at Blue Fox Cafe; met a couple of new friends, one named Lynda at the cafe; visited the Butterfly Gardens; drove along the Malahat scenic views; experienced high tea at Pendray Inn and Tea House; and finally dinner at the Pagliacci’s.
  • Day 8 – Took the ferry back from Swartz Bay to Tsawwassen just in time to do lunch at HK BBQ Master; say goodbye to Derrick and Maple; and back on the afternoon flight to Toronto; Darci welcomed us back home at 2:00am on the following day!

The most memorable part of the trip was of course getting to meet up with our family and friends. The best food from this trip had to be from HK BBQ Master, in my opinion, with an honorable mention of the Banh-mi sandwiches that Derrick got for us from his famous Vietnamese sandwich vendor.

What would we do differently? I think knowing what we know about Nanaimo, we would probably skip all of Nanaimo1 and reallocate the days to be one more in Vancouver and an extra day in Victoria. We would also switch the order of our visit to Vancouver and the Island. This way we can spend more time during the weekend with our friends and family.

With this trip and our visit to Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia, we have completed our tour of all of the provincial capitals in Canada. Checkbox checked!

Below is a summary video produced by Carol of our trip.

Produced, Directed, and Edited by Carol
  1. I decided to visit Nanaimo out of curiosity based on the Gweilo 60 YouTube channel that I follow. ↩︎