Omar Tsai

 Hello world! Realized I haven't written here in a while so I might as well just update this blog. Since September, I've been pretty pretty! Work has been the most draining of all so far, with most of my time just thinking about the problems at work. To be honest, oftentimes I get really anxious. Whether it's imposter syndrome or just my general personality, it kind of prevents me from feeling 100% safe at work. I can't talk about much for work so I'll just say it's a highly selective environment - which might be leading to this. I've decided to use the free counselling I get at work though . It reminds me of when I was in grade school and had a counsellor as well. That really calmed my nerves down. I hope it can do the same for me here too. Asides from that, I've been working on this research paper that i've put off for ages now. It's finally being drafted, and I hope I can get it done soon. In my regular life, I've been learning more chines

So it's nearly been a month since my last blog post - - which means, time for another one! Today, I'd like to write about living alone and the little happy points of my limited interactions with others. I recently moved to Ottawa! It's a moderately sized city - a population of 1 million people and the capital city of Canada! Since moving here alone, I've had more time to myself than at any other point in my life. The first few days were especially nauseating due to sleep deprivation and lack of a bed. But quickly that all changed. Once I settled down and started working, I came to realize a few things when living alone that make me happy. I'm going to write out some things that have been working for me that have made my day or just made me happy in general. Little wins that make my day :) Going for walks every day I've now set up a set time every single day to go out for walks. In fact, I go to parliament every single day just to look at the view! It's so ni

So ever since COVID and the crazy quantitative easing that has occured by many governments in the world, we now see an out of control inflation rate. Of course, it affects all of our daily lives - from the rising food costs to the gas we use. Rent is also at all time highs right now! I'd like to address a few key points in this article. What is inflation? What is causing inflation? My thoughts on inflation So what is inflation? Inflation is very simply "a persistent rise in the average level of prices over time" - Bank of Canada . The results of inflation are increases in prices such as food, services, and housing. You can see this anywhere, from the increased rent prices to your average meal going from a couple of bucks to now 10-20$ on average! This sounds terrible! Why do we need inflation then? Well, that's a great question! A good amount of inflation has helped shape the modern world - from average wage increasing to easing international trade, inflation is almos

I used to think that making and publishing music was as easy as uploading a youtube video. I make some sounds on the keyboard, mash them up, and the click upload. I could then publish to my favourite music players such as Youtube Music and Spotify. What I've learned these past few weeks could not be further from the truth. So around a few weeks ago, I started to become serious in taking on making some music as a hobby. I intially looked up how to get started using reddit, finding out quickly that I needed to choose a DAW (digital audio workstation). Of course, I look up what DAW a beginner like me should use and I'm bombarded with a TON of options. I initially tried out Ableton as that seems like it was really popular. However, quickly I switched to FL Studio as I liked the interface better with the piano roll UI.  Luckily, I still have a teeeeeny  bit of music theory that I remember from my piano days so I'm not a completely terrible composer. That said, I've watched o

Motivation This week, I've been trying to understand the meaning behind knowing oneself. What does that even mean? Throughout my life, I've seen monks and famous people preach that one must medidate and think. One must always have some time reserved for thinking.  Here's what I've come to understand from my short while of trying to understand this question - and evaluating how far I've truly come to understand myself. First, as an anime fan I'd like to show off a quote by one of my favorite characters from Naruto: Itachi. " If you want to know who you are, you have to look at your real self and acknowledge what you see ". My findings Now what I'd like to talk about is that this is a very simple question - who am I ? I've come to a list of questions that come into my mind and I'd like to share them here. Why/When/How does one get angry? Why/When/How does one get upset? Why does one do things they do? (What are the motivtions behind your acti

TheValley Recon A simple Rustscan shows us that there are 3 ports open.       We see that port 22 is for SSH, port 80 is for the web server, and port 37378 is for FTP based on the version scan from NMAP: Trying to connect to the FTP server results in nothing. So we start looking on the web server. Initial Foothold We run Gobuster, and find the following directories: all of which we look around but don't notice anything interesting off the bat (using both ZAP and viewing the source code). However, we find something interesting when we run Gobuster on one directory lower (on the /static directory). So we go to `/00` and find that it has a note: so we navigate to the directory /dev1243224123123  and find a login page and viewing the source page, we see the login username and password in the dev.js script! Logging in, it says that the credentials are re-used with FTP. So we take the same credentials and use it for FTP: and we transfer those files to our computer for further analysis. W

雞胸男 - The chicken breast man I'm currently in Taiwan on vacation - and what I've seen on the news is a great display of what news in Taiwan is all about. Let me explain why Taiwanese news is very different from the news I see in North America. In Taiwan, news channels obviously talk about current events. The political stuff, the sad stuff, and the dangerous stuff. But there's one key distinction in Taiwanese news compared with the regular news I watch in Canada - and that is in storytelling. You see, in Taiwan, it doesn't matter what kind of news you get. The reporters tell it like a story kind of like you're watching a reality TV show. For example, with traffic accidents, you get real traffic footage of how an accident unfolded. When you see disputes in a convenience store, 8 hours later some reporter has obtained the CCTV footage from the store owners. It makes it such that news reporting is covered so in-depth that you get detailed explanations of events that onl

Finally got level 12 on tryhackme. Took me a while but I did it! Now the next goal is to get to level 13! Which is the highest level. Don't know how long that will take me. Currently sitting at top 1% though. There's something about it which feels nice. Like I achieved something. That's all!

Wow! Looking back in time to my blog as a kid really brings back memories. So much has changed in 10 years time! I went from being a kid in elementary to now a graduate student in university. How time really flies huh. Looking back, I always thought it was this happy place for me when-ever I wrote here. Even though I knew there weren't many people (if any at all) reading my blogs, I still felt like writing them. Nowadays, I keep my blog on my own website at thaomar.com. Though that hasn't been updated in a while too (lol). I'll still come here from time to time, just to vent my thoughts, how I feel. I hope one day, I can look back at this blogspot and see how much I've come. From an idea that my mum and dad once told me to start to where I am now. Til next time! Omar