Omar Tsai

Happy Chinese New Years! 新年快樂! Ice dragon sculpture in Ottawa It's the start of a new lunar year! I'm writing this on 初三, which means 3 days since the new year has started! This year, I didn't do much for Lunar New Year since I'm here in Ottawa now. Usually, I would go to a temple in Vancouver to pray, but there are no Buddhist temples here in Ottawa 😅. You see, my family is quite spiritual - as in. Growing up, my parents would always take us either to Buddhist temples or Christian churches to pray. I even attended Sunday school growing up! The value of tradition holds strongly in my family, and we always try to be honest with any spiritual being, whether that be God or Mazu.  Aside from tradition, we'd usually have hotpot or the like at home! Which, of course now that everyone is scattered across the world, we can't really do that anymore! But that's ok! We of course had a call and just had fun chatting with each other.  It was also in this new year that I

Hi Omar! You might be the only one reading this, or you might not. If you aren't me and you are reading this, then welcome. I thought I would write a reflection on how my year went. In a similar fashion to how Bill Gates or Warren Buffet writes annual shareholder letters, I'd like to also write a letter. But since I have no shareholders, I've decided to write a letter to myself. So here goes! If I could summarize this year in one word, it would be the word change.  The changes in my life that Omar in 2022 could have never imagined. Starting out in 2023, I was still completing my courses for my masters at Simon Fraser University. I had just gotten back from my co-op in Ottawa, and I was just phoning it in for the last semester. For the first time in my life, I learned how to snowboard! It was an amazing experience with my then-girlfriend J - and I can proudly call myself a beginner snowboarder now! During that last semester, all my friends around me were looking for jobs. In

Migrating from DigitalOcean to Oracle Use case My use-case was relatively simple. We needed an application to track supply chain demands over time. The reason was that the company I was working with were still using hand-written notes and sending these notes to vendors who would then transcribe it and send assets over. All of this took a lot of overhead and time; furthermore, it was very easy to forget what kind of assets were already purchased since there was no searchable history. The tech stack built to approach this problem was a front-end built in react and hosted statically. The backend was a simple Django application, simply wrapping around my DB and simply hosting the API / backend. This was the only thing I needed to host and honestly it could be a completely serverless application, but I didn't want to muck around too much with serverless as this project had a timeline of a week. Digital Ocean Digital ocean, as you may already know, is a cloud hosting provider for develop

I really think, that to get anywhere in life we have to continually push ourselves. This stems from what I've felt over the past few years. I realized that I'm not happy just working a 9-5. I need to work a job, have many side projects going on, and be working towards something meaningful.  Case in point: recently I was finishing up this paper. It was really hard to juggle so much time between work, implementing our method, and writing the  paper. Oh, and that's not to mention all the daily obligations of life! But, I felt more productive in all aspects of my life! Not only in being able to do many things at once, but I also r ealized that I was more productive at work related tasks! It's fascinating that working more makes me more productive rather than the other way around. Kind of makes me wonder if this is what the definition of a workaholic is? 🤔 Anyhow! That's my little rant of today! It finally started snowing in Ottawa. In fact, today was the first day it a

 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