The Skyride cable car that carries people up and down Grouse Mountain.

The mountain top area where most of the fun stuff is located.

Getting to Grouse Mountain is pretty simple by car or bus. You just have to get to Capilano Rd. in North Vancovuer and keep driving North, continuing onto Nancy Greene Way and you’ll see the signs. General admission to the mountain top is around $40 per adult which is not cheap, but the resort offers annual memberships for $100 for the frequent visitors. There are two well-known ways to get up the mountain: either take the Skyride cable car or climb up through the Grouse Grind, a popular trail well-known for its steepness. I originally wanted to try the Grouse Grind, but we went on a hot summer day and my family thought it wasn’t the best idea, so we took the Skyride up instead. The Skyride takes about 6 minutes to reach the mountain-top area, and as the car gets higher visitors can get an increasingly wider view of the cities of the Greater Vancouver area.

The view from on top of Grouse Mountain. The most prominent city in this photo is West Vancouver.

Upon arriving at the mountain-top area, we were treated to an awesome view of the cities below. we could clearly make out West Vancouver, North Vancouver, Vancouver, Burnaby, and even parts of Richmond. After spending some time to take in the scenery and eat lunch, we started exploring the area. There is quite a bit of things to do and see on Grouse Mountain in the summer. For one things, there are a lot of impressive looking wood carvings placed everywhere. There are also a couple of live shows, and visitors can also go zip-lining or paragliding (at extra cost). The zip-lining and paragliding looked like they were fun, but we stuck to the more tamed activities on the mountain.

A photo of a paraglider (a customer and a pilot/guide) up in the sky. It looks like a lot of fun.

A handler brings out a peregrine falcon during the Birds in Motion demonstration.

First we watched the Birds in Motion demonstration, during which a red-tailed hawk and a peregrine falcon performed. There was a bald eagle too, but he didn’t fly during the show we watched. Next up, we took the scenic chairlift to the highest point of the mountain. The scenic chairlift is quite slow compared to your average ski chairlift, but fortunately there was a slight breeze which makes sitting on the chairlift under the hot sun a bit more bearable. With the scenic chairlift and Skyride, it’s more fun to ride them downwards than up. When riding up, your sight tend to be focused on the the mountain side that the lift is climbing up, but on their way down you can see the gorgeous view of the cities below the mountain.

The scenic chairlift up to the peak. It's very very slow.

The Eye of the Wind turbine. Supposedly it can supply up to 50% of the power needed by the park.

The peak of the mountain is where people start their paragliding or zip-lining adventures. The other attraction to see on the peak is the Eye of the Wind, a giant wind turbine with a viewing pod for visitors. The Eye of the Wind is about 50m tall and can be seen from Vancouver on a clear day. Going up into the viewing pod costs $25 which we thought was a bit expensive, so we just looked around the bottom of the windmill instead and then took the chairlift back down.

That’s it for my first trip to Grouse Mountain. This time I just looked around a bit and didn’t take part in too many of the mountain-top activities, but maybe next time I’ll come back to tackle the Grouse Grind or perhaps even ski in the winter. First I’d have to learn how to ski though lol.

A few months ago, the 5 year old 17 inch Norcent LCD in my home started acting strangely. Pushing the power button will cause the monitor to light up for a split second then it’ll go dim. In the first few days, the monitor will eventually stay lit after turning it on or off many times and it would work for the day, but we had repeat the process the next day and things progressively got worse. I did some research online, and in particular I found this very handy article. The symptoms or my monitor are consistent with a back light problem, and this seems to be common problem with LCD monitors. I confirmed the problem by shining a light onto the monitor after it went dark. The monitor was displaying the signal, but there was no back light. The cause of the problem can be a faulty back light bulb or inverter board, and if it’s the inverter board the likely cause is bad capacitor(s). Given that our LCD was 5 years old and made by a bottom-tier manufacturer, I wouldn’t be surprised if the problem was just some bad capacitors so I decided to try and repair the monitor. After all, I am an electrical engineering student, and although electronics is not my specialty, I have soldered before and this sounded like an easy repair. My family bought a new monitor to use, but we kept the old monitor around until I had time to deal with it.

The old Norcent LM730, ready to be taken apart.

These four screws secures the stand to the monitor. It took me 40 minutes to figure out that they are there.

To repair a LCD monitor, first your have to open it up by removing the stand and back cover. It’s recommended to do the dis-assembly on a soft surface so that there’s less chance of damaging the screen. The back cover is often clipped into the front with plastic clips and secured using screws. The Norcent I was dealing with had four screws on the corners that was visible. I removed the four screws and tried to pry the monitor open with a flat blade screw driver (not recommended if you don’t want to scratch the outer casing, but I didn’t care since this was an old monitor) and spent 40 minutes at it, but something was holding down the back cover near the bottom. Eventually, I discovered that the stand was also fastened into the LCD by four screws, but these screws are hidden underneath two plastic covers that had to be removed. I was feeling pretty stupid at the moment, but I continued on, removed the four screws and took off the back cover. The lesson here is that to make sure you remove all the screws before trying to pry open the back cover.

After much effort, I finally popped off the back cover to reveal the protective casing and all the goodies inside.

Removing the back cover reveals a protective metal casing sitting over the circuit boards of the LCD. For my monitor, the protective casing can be removed by releasing two screws on the left and then sliding the cover to the right. However, removing the casing proved to be more complicated than that as two connectors when through the casing at the bottom. The wider connectors is for the front panel controls, while the narrow black connector is for the speakers. The wide connector was relatively easy to remove, by the speaker connector took a lot of fidgeting mainly because the socket on the circuit board was loose, and therefore I dare not pull too hard on it. It took me about 10 minutes to unplug the cables and remove the casing.

The Power/Inverter board removed from the rest of the monitor.

With the protective casing gone, I got a good look at the two main circuit boards of the monitor. The larger yellow board on the left is the power supply and back light inverter board, and the green board on the right is the Analog to Digital converter. At this point, it was time to inspect the circuit board and components for any abnormalities. For radial electrolytic capacitors (the tall cylindrical objects in the picture), the tops should be flat and nothing should be leaking out of the capacitors. From my inspection, I found one capacitor on the power/inverter board that had a bulging top, and I assumed that was the troublemaker as everything else looks fine.

Found the culprit. The bad capacitor is the one with the black marking on top.

The bad capacitor was a 16V 1000uF radial capacitor. If you don’t have any capacitors on hand, you can buy some from local electronic stores (those that cater to hobbyists) or from online sources. Luckily for me, I actually had some capacitors left over from my undergrad electronic labs, and in my collection was a 1000uF capacitor rated at 50V. The voltage rating of a capacitor is the maximum voltage the capacitor can be used under, so in many cases it’s okay to replace a capacitor with another one with a higher voltage rating, provided they have the same capacitance. The 50V replacement capacitor was a fair bit taller than the broken 16V, but it looked like it would still fit under the protective cover, and the good thing was that the two capacitor had the same spacing between their terminals. That means I only had to straighten the wires on the replacement and it should plug right back in.

To remove the bad capacitor, first I had to remove the circuit board so I can access its underside. The power/inverter board was fastened to the front monitor by several screws which were easily removed. There were also a couple of connectors to the back light that have to be disconnected, and it’s important to note down the orientation and location of the connectors. It’s also important to keep track of all the screws that have been removed.

At that moment, I suddenly realized that I didn’t have any soldering tools at home, so I went to a local hardware store and bought a $10 soldering iron and $4 worth of rosin core thin solder. A $10 soldering iron probably won’t be too reliable, but I didn’t want to spend too much money on this repair. The soldering iron worked well enough though, although it does take a bit of time to heat up.

The two capacitors: the smaller one on the right is the bad one, while the larger one on the left is the replacement.

Back to the task at hand, removing the bad capacitor is a pretty straight forward job. All I had to do is used the soldering iron to heat up the solder on the underside of the board and wiggle the bad capacitor out on the topside. This is much easier to do if you have something to hold the circuit board in a vertical position. Since this particular capacitor wasn’t located closely to any other component, I didn’t even need to use any solder sucker or solder wick. After the bad capacitor was removed, I put in the replacement which slid right in as the two capacitors have the same distance between terminals. The board clearly indicates which side is positive and which side is negative, but it’s always important remember which way the capacitor should go in as electrolytic capacitors can blow up if inserted in the wrong direction. The striped side of the capacitor is always the negative terminal. Resoldering the capacitor was pretty easy as well; I just melted a dab of solder onto each wire and let it form the bond with the board. I then snipped off the extra wire from the terminals of the replacement capacitor and that’s all for the soldering.

The replacement capacitor soldered back on to the board.

The repair board mounted back into the monitor.

All that was left to do now was to reassemble the monitor and test it. Having learned from my mistakes during dis-assembly, I took much less time to reassemble the monitor. All I had to do now is to test if my hard work had actually fixed problem. First I just plugged the monitor into the wall plug and turned it on to see if smoke will come out. Thankfully, nothing of the sort happened, and the “no signal” message displayed on the screen and it was clear that the back light was working. I then connected the monitor to my computer, and the screen displayed without any problems. The monitor was fine once again and all it took was $15 worth of equipment and a bit of elbow grease.

The old Norcent LM730 is displaying once again! In case you are wondering, I drew the picture displayed on the monitor.

Looking back at the process, taking apart the monitor was definitely the hardest part of the job. That was mostly because I was unfamiliar with the monitor’s construction and I was also being dumb. The soldering part was quite easy by comparison. Despite having shaky hands, I managed to complete the job without any problems. Then again, I did spend a couple months doing hardware testing in a co-op job and the kind of soldering I had to do there was much more difficult than this job (I got my work done, but killed a lot of test boards in the process ). Overall, replacing a capacitor in a LCD monitor is pretty simple repair that almost anybody can do with a little bit of research and equipment. I hope this post will be some help to people facing a similar problem. Thanks for reading.

Since I’ll be going abroad to study and won’t be bringing my own computer, I need some way to take my files with me and that means buying an external hard drive. I don’t have that many files, so any of the external hard drives that’s on the market today would be fine in terms of capacity. The main factors I considered was price, physical size, interface, and other features. After weighing the pros and cons, I decided to get a 2.5″ drive instead of the 3.5″ ones. 3.5″ drives have much better cost/GB, but they are heavier and need a separate plug while many 2.5″ can be powered by the USB connection. Interface-wise, the majority of external hard drives these days are USB 2.0. There are some that use eSATA, Firewire, or USB 3.0 which are all faster but are less common. For me, USB 2.0 is the most convenient, but I wouldn’t mind anything extra. Feature-wise, I want the drive to come with backup software so I can use the drive to backup my files.

With this set of criteria, I started doing research and found that many manufacturers have products that fit the bill. At that point, all it came down to was price, and I ended up buying the Seagate because it was on sale. My budget was under ~$100 Cdn, and so I bought the 500GB model which sold for about $90 before tax.

The box for the GoFlex 500GB. Sorry for the blurry photo. The pic was taken with my cellphone cam which doesn't have very good image stablization.

The back of the GoFlex box, with the stats in no less than four languages.

The GoFlex came in a average-looking small box with a picture of the product in front and the usual descriptions and stats on the sides and back. The packaging is certainly not Apple-quality, but it’ll suffice.

The three pieces of hardware: the drive (left), the USB 2.0 interface adapter (top right), and the USB cable (bottom right).

Inside, plastic packaging held three pieces of hardware along with a quick-setup guide and the warranty info. There is no driver/software CD, as all of the software is loaded into the drive. The three pieces of hardware in the box are the hard drive, a one foot long USB 2.0 cable (male mini USB to male type A) and the USB 2.0 interface adapter. All the hardware is colored black to match and the drive and adapter have glossy plastic on the top and sides. The interface adapter has two white lights on the top. The glossy surface gives the device a shiny and sophisticated look when new, but the black color and glossy surface means that the drive is a dust and fingerprint magnet. The look is not a big deal for me though.

The GoFlex series differentiates itself from the competition by having upgradable interfaces, and by default the drives are packed with the USB 2.0 kit. For $20-30, one can buy the adapter kits for eSATA, Firewire 800, or USB 3.0 and swap out the USB 2.0 interface. By inspecting the back end of the hard drive, you can see that the drive itself has a standard SATA interface, and the adapters just bridge that to another interface. I might think about upgrading the interface in the future, but for now USB 2.0 is all I need.

Everything assembled and ready to go.

The GoFlex connected to my PC.

Installing the drive was very easy. Just plug in the interface adapter into the back end of the hard drive and plug the cable into the mini-USB plug on the adapter. After that, connect the cable to the computer and the computer should automatically detect the drive as a mass-storage device. The software on the drive will then launch and prompt you to register the product and install the software. The main control/administration software is called Seagate Dashboard, but the backup utility is actually provided by Memeo. I have used Memeo’s backup software before (from a Buffalo LinkStation) and found it to be a decent program, so it’s good that the GoFlex comes bundled with it. However, the Memeo Instant Backup software is a little limited in terms of which folders it can back up, and I guess the point is to encourage people to buy the Premium Backup software. The Instant Backup software is enough for me though. The installer can also install trial versions of other Memeo programs, but I only needed the backup software.

The GoFlex shows up as a new disk drive when connected.

The drive comes with these files already loaded.

The registration interface.

Installing the software for the GoFlex. The drive comes with a full version of Memeo Instant Backup, but all the rest are trial versions.

The Seagate Dashboard adminstration interface.

The settings window from the Seagate Dashboard software.

So far, I’ve transferred some files onto the GoFlex and it seems to be reasonably fast. I don’t have any numbers, but the hard drive is definitely faster than the no-name 1GB USB key that I use. I love how small and light the drive is and that it doesn’t need a all plug. The possibly of upgrading the interface is a nice bonus too. Hopefully this drive will last for the next few years as I use it to transport and backup my files. Thanks for reading.

Before the summer of last year, I didn’t like blueberries at all. The ones my family bought from the supermarket were mostly sour, and in addition they had a weird taste to them. My dislike for blueberries ended last summer when there was a bumper crop of blueberries in the Lower Mainland region. We never picked blueberries before and we decided to give it a try. It was then that we discovered that not all blueberries taste bad, and some of them can be quite good. We were hooked from the last year’s experience, and when blueberry season came along we were rearing to go.

A row in the blueberry farm. Usually you can get enough blueberries by just going down one row.

Thanks to the growing popularity of the fruit and the climate of the region, there are a lot of blueberry farms in and around the Lower Mainland. We went to one that is along No. 6 road in Richmond. The segment of No. 6 road between Westminster Hwy. and Steveston Hwy. has quite a few blueberry farms on the west side of the road that let people pick their own berries (the so called “u-pick”). Prices are different from farm to farm, but the cheapest is not necessarily the best option. First of all, the quality of the blueberries is very important. Good blueberries are delicious but bad blueberries are awful, so it’s better to go to a farm with a better quality product even if it costs a bit more per pound. Secondly, some farms have minimum amounts and other rules, and I suggest you ask first before picking. The price for u-pick isn’t necessarily the cheapest; sometimes even retail stores have lower prices. However, if you think about it, picking blueberries is still a good deal because you can eat blueberries *for free* while picking them. After a bit of trial and error, we eventually settled for a farm that has big and tasty blueberries and no restrictions. Their prices weren’t the lowest, but the pros makes up for this con. Besides, I tend to eat a lot during picking and that helps to make up the price difference .

Here is what a blueberry bush looks like.

Back to this year, this was our second time picking blueberries for the year. We went once about a week or two ago, and that turned out to be a little too early. Most of the blueberries weren’t ripe (they were green or red), and so we had to settle for the whatever ripe ones there were, regardless of their size. The ones we picked weren’t too sweet, and I had to add ice cream to eat them. Thankfully, things improved a lot this time around, and there were a lot of ripe and big blueberries. The fruits aren’t as sweet as the ones we picked at the end of last summer, but most of them aren’t sour. When ripe blueberries are plentiful, we usually go for the biggest ones and avoid the ones that are unripe (red) or overly ripe. Blueberry bushes are usually grown in rows, and to get to the biggest berries we like to go to the innermost rows of the farm where most people don’t go. It takes a little more walking, but the larger blueberries are worth the effort.

A closer shot of some blueberries on the bush.

As I mentioned before, picking blueberries is an easy activity. The good thing about blueberries is that their bushes are around a person’s height (4-7ft tall), so you don’t have to bend down to pick them if you don’t want to. I usually just ignore anything below my waist level, but since I’m relatively tall I like to reach up for the high ones. The size of the berries have nothing to do with the height they are located, but sometimes I find bigger ones up top because there aren’t many tall people picking blueberries. In my family, I tend to have the largest average size for picked berries, but on the other hand I tend to pick the smallest number because I spend too much time choosing and eating. On this day I still had a decent amount though, having filled over half of my bowl in around 45 minutes. Of course, my other family members still picked more than I did.

Here are the berries I picked at the end of the day. It's not a lot, but it's high quality (at least that's what I think).

In total, my family picked quite a bit of blueberries, and it’ll take us at least a week to consume them all. I find picking blueberries to be an enjoyable activity, and hopefully I’ll have a chance to go pick blueberries once more before I leave for grad school.

The Horseshoe Bay Ferry Terminal. The overhead walkway from the terminal entrance to the ferries was quite the lengthy stroll.

To get to the Sunshine Coast, first we had to go to the Horseshoe Bay to take the ferry to Langdale, aka the entrance to the Sunshine Coast. The Sunshine Coast is technically connected to the mainland, but due to the geography it’s much faster to take the ferry. Going there via road takes over 2 hours as you have to drive up north and go the long way around, but the ferry takes only 30-40 minutes. Ticket prices for the ferry was $12.60 for an adult round trip, and funny enough tickets are only sold on the Horseshoe Bay end. You only need to pick up a boarding pass when returning and I didn’t spot any ticket booths at the Langdale terminal.

The top of the Queen of Surrey which carried us to Langdale.

The Horseshoe Bay – Langdale route is serviced by a couple of Cowichan Class double-ended ferries. They are not quite as big or new as the ones that serve the Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay route, but they are still pretty big as far as BC Ferries go. The ferry trip is relatively short, but fairly scenic as you can get a good view of Bowen Island and the other coastal features of the area.

The view from on top of the ferry at Horseshoe Bay terminal.

The Langdale Ferry Terminal

As I mentioned before, Langdale is the beginning of the Sunshine Coast area, but it’s not our planned destination for the day. We wanted to go to Sechelt, which is located about 30km further west of Langdale at the “centre” of Sunshine Coast. There is the No. 1 bus that goes from Langdale ferry terminal to Sechelt, but it takes about an hour as the route frequently goes into residential areas.

A shot of the first pier we went to at Sechelt. It's the smaller, darker one in the foreground to the left.

The view from the first pier we went to. I thought the sky was a bit blurry that day, but this picture didn't turn out too badly.

One of the little soles we caught at the first pier. Way too small to cook.

We rode the bus to its final stop near a shopping centre, and behind the shopping centre was a trail and a pier. There was nobody on the pier, and the water below looked shallow, but we decided to give the fishing a try. In the span of half an hour or so we hooked three soles, but they were all tiny (~10cm long). Therefore, we decided to take the bus back a few stops to another pier. This second piers already had a few people fishing and crabbing on it, but what’s more there were a lot of kids playing on the pier jumping in to the water. It was a warm summer day, and the kids were out to play. All the people on a small pier created a somewhat hectic scene, but despite the kids playing in the water there were quite a fishes around. At the end of the day, we caught two decent sized soles. There was a gentleman fishing beside us and we saw he catch four or five soles, one of them being pretty big (well over a foot long). Another elderly gentleman caught two legal-sized Dungeness crabs, but we didn’t catch any crabs that day. Our fishing and crabbing venture wasn’t too successful that day, but at least we didn’t come back empty handed.

The second pier that we went to at Sechelt. This is where all the fishes, crabs, and kids are.

Other than fishing and crabbing, I also tried taking in the scenery. Shape-wise, the Sunshine Coast looks as good as any of the other BC coasts I’ve seen. However, the sky was a bit blurry despite it being sunny and warm, and there was fog/smog/smoke in the distance so the colours weren’t very sharp. The area probably looks more beautiful under blue skies.

Overall, my day trip to the Sunshine Coast was a good experience. The scenery wasn’t as good due to the weather, and we didn’t catch that many fish or crabs, but at least I went to a place I’ve never been before. I probably have time for one or two more day trips before I leave for the States, so hopefully there will be another trip coming up soon.

On to the second piece of news, JP’s Badminton Portal has also been rebuilt using WordPress, and what’s more it has been combined with JP’s Badminton Blog and moved to it’s own domain, www.jpbadminton.com. Formerly, the Badminton Portal was run using a self-wrote PHP content management system and the Badminton Blog ran on Textpattern. I had the Badminton Portal separate because I wanted to make the site truly bilingual (in English and Simplified Chinese), but after thinking about it I decided to combine the two sites to make administration easier. My self-wrote PHP script was buggy at places anyways. Importing from the Badminton Blog to the new Badminton Portal was fairly easy as there is an import script available online, but all the articles from the old Badminton Portal had to be manually moved. I also built a custom theme for the site using Thematic Theme Framework. There are still some minor tweaks for the new Badminton Portal, but it’s ready for visitors.

Hopefully the changes to both websites will improve the visitors’ experiences and draw more traffic.

Sea to Sky Highway

To drive to Whistler from Vancouver, one usually takes Highway 99. The part of highway 99 that snakes along the coast is known as the Sea to Sky Highway, probably named for the exceptional scenery along the route featuring inlets and mountains. Other than the scenery, the highway is or maybe was known for being accident prone due to the curving nature of the route, but thanks to a big upgrade for the Olympics most of the highway now has central dividers to prevent head-on collisions. There are a lot of places of interest and tourist spots along the highway one can stop by, and I’ll mention two of them near the end of this post.

A view out the window on the Sea to Sky Highway. As some of you might have figured, this shot was taken on the way back from Whistler.

Whistler Village

Located conveniently under Whistler Mountain and Blackcomb Mountain, the Whistler Village is the central area where all the ski-lifts, shops, restaurant and most of the accommodation is located. It definitely has the resort-town feel to it with the stylish short buildings (<5 stories) and the pedestrian only Village Stroll. There are more people this time then the last time I visited (also during summer), and I'm guessing that the successful Winter Olympics helped attract visitors from around the world. Whistler Village is not very big and it only takes about 30 minutes to walk from one end of the Village Stroll to the other when walking at a decent pace. It's definitely worth to stroll around the village once during the first visit, but be aware that most things tend to be more expensive in resort towns like Whistler.

The Village Stroll within Whistler Village. All the buildings in the village are of a similar style.

Black Bears

Situated in the middle of the mountains and woods, it’s no surprise that Whistler has its fair share of black bears. A fun fact we learned during our stay at Whistler is that there is approximately one black bear per one square kilometer of Whistler, meaning that there is a pretty good chance you’ll run into one. During the entire trip I saw several black bears, and the closest encounter was when I was walking down a dirt road into the village. There was a small black bear foraging on the other side of the road as people walked past. The bear ignored the people, and people either just walked past or took photos (like me). Black bears are usually not aggressive, and Whistler seems to be doing a pretty guarding their trash cans from the bears so for now people and black bears can coexist peacefully most of the time.

A small (<200lb) black bear foraging on the side of the road. I was on the other side about 20 feet away.

Alpha Lake

Alpha Lake is a small lake located near Highway 99 a little bit south of Whistler Village and it is surrounded by a park and vacation properties. Some members of my family were keen on fishing and so we visited the lake in hope of hooking some rainbow trout and kokanee (landlocked sockeye salmon). Unfortunately, we brought the wrong bait and didn’t get a single bite. You are supposed to flyfish on the lake, but we brought worms, so the fishing operation was a failure. The Alpha Lake Park was a pretty nice place though. There are tennis courts, a playground and views of the lake surrounding mountains.

A shot from the far side of Alpha Lake. Nice place, but too bad we didn't get a single bite with the fishing.

Lost Lake

Lost Lake is another small lake located near Whister Village and one can easily walk to the lake. The Lost Lake Park has many walking, cycling and (in the winter) cross-country ski trails for visitors to explore. The lake side also has a beautiful beach that has a view of the lake, surrounding forests, and the snow-capped mountains. Supposedly one could fish for trout there too, but by that time we already gave up on fishing.

The beautiful beach at Lost Lake. This is one of the best scenery photos I took during this trip.

Ths starting platform to one of the zip-lines on the Eagle Tour. Was I scared? Oh yes, at least initally.

ZipTrek EcoTour

Other than just walking around Whistler, I was convinced to go on a ZipTrek EcoTour by some of my relatives despite being not all that brave. ZipTrek is a company that operates zip-lines and forest tours around the world, and Whistler is their original location. The zip-lines are located on Blackcomb Mountain and you have to take a bus to get up there. We went on their newer Eagle Tour, which features five zip-lines, including a 2200 feet one that is supposedly the longest in North America. In between the zip-lines, there were also treks through the forest with the guides explaining some information about forests and the wildlife, and in total the whole tour takes more than three hours. Most of it was spent walking through the forest and waiting for your turn on the zip-lines though. The actual ride time on each zip line is around 10 seconds or less, but they are an exhilarating 10 seconds as you learn what it feels like to fly through the forest. Because I’m not too brave, I held on to my rope most of the time, but a few people in the same group started doing tricks and went upside down after the second zip-line. At over $100 per person, the tour was not cheap but it was quite the experience. ZipTrek operates all year around, but it’s probably better to go during the summer when the weather is nice. Winter might be fun too, but not during the rainy days.

Tree-top platforms are also part of Ziptrek's Ecotours. These platforms are about 20-30 meters off the ground.

A look back at the village while riding the Whistler Village Gondola up to Whistler Mountain.

Peak 2 Peak Experience

This is the last attraction I went to at Whistler. One of the most advertised attractions at Whistler, the Peak 2 Peak is a gondola line connecting Whistler Mountain to Blackcomb Mountain. The Peak 2 Peak 1 day experience costs around $40 per person and includes rides up and down from the mountains. To start the tour, we took the Whistler Village Gondola up Whistler Mountain. During the ride, we saw many hardcore mountain bikers blistering their way down the lower parts of the mountain. As the gondola moves higher, the vegetation changes and soon there is snow. The whole ride up takes about 20 minutes.

The top of Whistler Mountain, still covered in snow. The elevation is over 2000m above sea-level.

The top of Whistler Mountain (and Blackcomb Mountain as well) is still covered in snow even in the middle of summer. As such, there are people who come up here to ski and snowboard in the summer, although they probably can’t go very far. To take advantage of the snow, we went snow tubing which cost $5 per person for the whole day. Going down the slope on the tube was fun, but dragging the tube back up the hill was not. We went until we were too tired from climbing up the hill.

A view out the windows of the Peak 2 Peak Gondola car to another gondola car.

The top of Blackcomb Mountain, also covered in snow and about the same elevation as Whistler Mountain.

At that point, we took the Peak 2 Peak Gondola to Blackcomb Mountain. Supported by only four towers, the Peak 2 Peak Gondola holds world records for the longest span in between towers (3.024km) and highest point above ground (436m) for a gondola. From the Gondola, we got a perfect view of Fitzsimmons Creek which runs in the valley between the two mountains along with the other nearby mountains and a bit of Whistler Village. After arriving at the top of Blackcomb, we looked around for a bit and then took one of the ski-lifts back down to Whistler Village. I’ve never been in a chair lift before, so this was another first for me. After the Peak 2 Peak Experience, we left Whistler and went back on Highway 99.

Riding the ski lift down from Blackcomb Mountain.

Shannon Falls

There are quite a few attractions along Highway 99, and Shannon Falls is one of them. At 335m tall, Shannon Falls is the third tallest waterfall in British Columbia, and it’s located just south of Squamish in a provincial park. As with many parks in the region, there are trails through the woods, and a viewing platform to get up close and personal with the waterfall.

The majestic Shannon Falls.

Porteau Cove

Porteau Cove is another provincial park located along Highway 99. The main attraction is the view over Howe Sound and the mountains beyond, but there is also a boat launch ramp and camp site for people to use and rocky beaches for visitors to explore. We mostly stayed near the pier and just took in the views of the waters, mountains and forests.

The pier at Porteau Cove with view of Howe Sound and beyond.

That is all for my summer trip to Whistler. Whistler is a wonderful place during the summer, and I had a lot of fun during this trip. This probably won’t be my last trip to Whistler, especially if I ever manage to learn how to ski or snowboard. There are also quite a few summer attractions I didn’t get to visit this time as well, and maybe I will return for another summer sometimes.

Our catches for the day, consisting of 8 big red rock crabs. That's a lot of crabs.

Three weeks after my first trip to Sidney by the Sea, I went back once again on a day trip with several more of my relatives to fish and catch crabs. The journey to Sidney was pretty much the same as last time: we caught the 9 o’clock sailing to Swartz Bay and arrived at the pier at around 11:30. The crabbing was pretty good the last time, but this time it was even better. We kept catching really big red rock crabs. With our three traps, we caught a dozen or more legal-sized red rocks, but we only kept the biggest eight because we only had two fishing licenses. The smallest red rock we kept was 14cm across the carapace. That’s pretty big considering legal size is 11.5cm. Our largest catch was a massive 16cm across the shell, making him almost on par with Dungeness crabs. My relatives and I have never caught so many big red rocks in one trip, and we were definitely impressed with the crabbing at Sydney. On the slight downside, we didn’t get any legal-sized male Dungeness crabs. All the big Dungenesses we caught were large females which we cannot keep.

Four red rock crabs we caught from the first trap we lifted. Two of these red rocks were quite large.

Compared to our successful crabbing efforts, fishing was a letdown. We didn’t catch anything and don’t know if we got any bites either. This could be because a seal was hanging around in the area, scaring all the fish away. The one or two times that we felt something on our lines, it was actually crabs that were eating the bait.

After around two hours on the pier, we went for lunch at Fish on 5th, right across from the bus stop back to Swartz Bay. I had two pieces of haddock with yam fries, and it was quite good and not too expensive. On the sailing back to Tsawwassen we got on a newer ferry called the Coastal Celebration. Our last three trips were on the Spirit of Vancouver Island. Compared to the Spirit of Vancouver Island, the Coastal Celebration had a larger outer deck area at the top and I spent a lot of time outside, watching the scenery of the Gulf Islands. I saw otters, seals, and even bald eagles feeding on the waters. Supposedly there were also killer whales, but I didn’t see them.

The sun deck of the Coastal Celebration

The front side of the sun deck on the Coastal Celebration

The back side of the sun deck on the Coastal Celebration

Once again, my day trip to Sidney has been a fun experience. I’m still full from eating all the crab we caught. Of course, I didn’t eat all of them by myself, but it was a lot of crab. I might return there again some time in the future, but it’s hard to say when it’ll be.

The move to the new host was pretty straight forward. I initiated the domain transfer process which took about a day, and during that time I transferred all my files over and set up the subdomains. Out of all of my websites, the only one that had any issues was this website. First of all, my new host uses the industry standard Cpanel which for some reason cannot point the default domain (tonyjiang.com or www.tonyjiang.com) to a subfolder within the public_html directory, so this WordPress blog didn’t work when I uploaded it as in a folder into public_html. Once I got that sorted out by uploading the WordPress files into public_html, I was met with the infamous White Screen of Death when I tried to access the admin panel. After searching on the web, I disabled all my plug-ins by renaming the plugins directory within WordPress, and my admin panel came back. After some troubleshooting, it seems that WP-Spamfree was the culprit, which is strange since I didn’t have problems with this plug-in on my old host. I killed that plug-in, but that wasn’t the end of my troubles. Afterwards, I tried to find a new anti-spam plug-in, but that caused WordPress to run into my host’s 32MB PHP memory limit. I didn’t want to delete any of my plug-ins, so I sent a support ticket to my new host, and thankfully they promptly replied by increasing the memory limit and everything was alright again.

I have settled into my new host, and everything looks okay so far. Hopefully my decision to move won’t come back and bite me in the behind. Since my websites receive little traffic, bandwidth and server load shouldn’t pose problems. Hopefully there will be no major downtimes or trouble with the host. Now that tonyjiang.com has found a new home, I’ll probably start working on some of my other websites.