One more revolution around the large hot mass of gas has passed and I have officially completed twenty three rounds.

Yay me.

Birthdays have never particularly been of great significance for me. I lost interest in them as a kid. Saw no reason to celebrate existence. Plus the superficial attempts of making one feel special through material gifts and pleasures just made me despise them even more.

Of course my views changed over time. I learnt that people do value their birthdays, so I tried to make others feel special on their birthdays. And then over time I felt like people just make each other feel special on their birthdays as an endless cycle of reciprocation. I be nice to you, in turn you be nice to me. I host a party, you buy me gifts. So in the end, it sort of cancels out and comes down to nothing.

Which equates to our general significance in this universe. Nothing. Null. Zero.

And yet everyone celebrates their birthday year after year. The one day where they hold significance. Where people whom had disappeared from your existence rise from the day to greet you with a post on your Facebook wall. And all that attention naturally turns it into a different day, something that doesn’t happen everyday.

So this year, I shall accept that my birthday is of significance. And take this space to reflect on what has changed in me since 365 days ago.

Ohh time travel is gonna be fun.

Exactly one year ago, my birthday was not too different. I was sitting at my desk in hostel, finishing up some pending assignment. I had long hair and a full beard. One that I had grown to mask my existence. I was at a point in life where I was completely lost. My self-worth was at it’s lowest, and I focused only on the few things that brought me happiness.

Music. Meditation. Coupled with a few other illicit substances.

The rest of humanity and existence was purely worthless to me. Beauty was a lie. There was only superficiality. Ego. Pride. Fake fucks. Everywhere.

And it was the day after that she entered my life. Slowly but surely she broke every notion I had on life. She showed me beauty. She showed me honesty. She showed me happiness, without the need for substances. She showed me love, in a world which had swallowed me up. She pulled me out of a vortex, just by existing.

The next few months were miraculous. I was still completely lost, but now there was also this phenomenal company. Once again I lost myself in something that I had no control over. How dumb of me, trying to have all the pleasures in the world with no pain.

I felt invincible, and worthless at the same time. It was a strange concoction. I had it all, and yet I had nothing. I was incredibly happy, and yet greatly depressed. It was madness. Lovely lovely madness.

Months passed to some time in May, when the fabric holding the madness broke. And everything came crashing down. And that very day I realised, that beneath all the external pleasures that I had held on to so dearly, I was nothing.  I was a nobody. I had no worth and no real impact on any life. If I were to be left on an island alone, I would not wanna do anything but to accept my fate and die. I hated myself. I hated what I became. I hated what I was.

And I decided hate cannot get me anywhere. So I worked to change. To change that hate into love. To change what used to define me into distant memories. To change myself into a better me. To give myself some worth. Take care of myself. Eliminate the negativity within one by one.

Slowly, I tried loving myself. And everytime I found something I didn’t like, I changed it. Cause who’s got the power to change you, but yourself. And in those next 3 months I changed.

Sounds cliche and cheesy, but I did. I became a different person. I saw the world differently. I saw myself differently. I started acting differently. I started responding instead of reacting. I found a fire within, and I started doing everything I could to make it burn brighter. And it became more obvious as to what were the things that tried to put off the fire. And I started actively guarding the fire. Making sure nothing, nobody can do anything to it.

I will burn, and continue burning. Nothing can stop me.

Life felt new. I was scared of going back to the old ways. Scared of hanging in old settings and environment. Scared of the past coming to haunt me. But everyday, I started realising how impossible it was to go back to that life. My small attempts at going back were automatically rejected by my mind and body. Guess we’re a team now. An unstoppable team.

Mind. Body. Soul.

Becoming one.

It’s fucking brilliant.

 

So yes, the past one year has been significant. Maybe this does call for a celebration.

Happy birthday to me (:

Keep glitching! (:

 

I believe that the brain works like a computer.

Memories organised neatly into folders. Some a little more accessible, right in the desktop. Some harder to find, deep beneath layers of folders. Opening one memory after another would lead to that particularly well stored and hidden memory.

Every folder could represent an entity. A place. A moment. A person.

Scratch that.

Every folder a person. Every moment a folder within that. Sorted according to last viewed. Everyone likes to go back to certain memories again and again,  pushing those to the top of the stack.

Again these people are sorted by the most recent activity. People with whom the memories are constantly updated remain at the top, while those with minimal contact get pushed to the bottom.

Over time, the number of folders start building up. More people, more memories, more folders.

The system starts to slow down, too many folders in the memory.

Everyday applications and programs get slowed down, sometimes even crash.

So for the sake of the system’s functionality, you delete some folders. Starting off with the smaller folders. Deleting them makes the system run a little more smoother, but over time it starts to slow down again. And then you go back to some of those larger folders, with more memories. Those are the ones truly slowing down the system.

You look through the files once more. Damn that’s a lot of files. You never even knew some of these existed in your computer. It’s been a while since you looked at this folder. Sure had a lot of memories with this person. But right now the folder is just slowing down your system passively.

So you delete it.

And the system runs a lot better. Much faster. Much more efficient.

But you know it’s only a matter of time before you have to perform a disk cleanup again.

On that rather depressing note, keep glitching (:

You look through the code again, line by line. It doesn’t make sense, it should have worked perfectly. Everything looks right. But somehow it keeps throwing an error. What could possibly be wrong?

And then your friend comes over, and takes a look at your code.

“Dude you missed a semicolon”

One semicolon. One fucking semicolon. 2 hours of your life had been devoted to finding that one semicolon which your friend found in 2 minutes. And this was the millionth time you were making that same old stupid mistake.

Every programmer would have encountered this at some point. Regardless of numerous years of experience, every coder experiences this. Some even fear it. Some loath it. But it is always there.

The Bug.

A bug (in the programming world) is defined to be an error or a glitch in the code, which results in the code not running as it is expected to. These errors can be very minor ones which leads to some minor glitches in the program (, or big enough to crash the entire system (or when an app crashes on your phone). What causes these bugs? Us humans of course.

So the only means of fixing the bug, is through the process of debugging. Look through the entirety of the executable code, to find the one mistake which led to the error. Beneath the layers of executable operations, the core of the error lies somewhere deep beneath, at a fundamental level. The error lies in the human.

Computers are perfect beings, they make no mistakes. They compile and execute programs flawlessly, to the maximum capabilities of its hardware. Humans however are very imperfect beings.

To err is human

We pride on our ability to make mistakes. We are flawed beings. Every single one of us. In a very unique way. Almost in a predictable way.

If you were to take a step back and map out every bug on your code, you could certainly map out a pattern in the kind of errors that you make. And more often than so, one is never able to find one’s own mistake. It is always easier to spot the bug on someone else’s code as compared to finding it in one’s own.

Putting this in a broader perspective, as humans we tend to keep making the same mistakes over and over. An alcoholic goes back to alcohol again and again despite the numerous times he has suffered from it. A smoker does not quit smoking regardless of detrimental health effects. An abusive husband continues abusing regardless of promising not to. The errors keep appearing again and again, because the human never sees them as an error. They have perfect explanations for acting the way they do. But to everyone else, the error is glaringly obvious. It is right there in your face, why the hell doesn’t she realise that she needs to break up from this guy? Why does he not want to quit his job despite being treated so badly? Everybody else can see this mistake, but the person committing them.

Until they decide to debug.

And to debug, is to truly sieve  through the multiple layers of executions, and arriving at the core reason, the fundamental nature of the being, and fixing that. It needs numerous “why”s, incredible amounts of patience, and constant searching, to be able to arrive at the core.

Could be a past failure, a broken relationship, loss of a friend, which leads to the minor glitch, which over various layers, affects other operations and decisions, building up over time, resulting in the undetectable flaws that we execute today.

So debug, and keep debugging. And be open to criticism. Cause some of the biggest flaws tend to be invisible to us.

And in the process of debugging, keep glitching.

Cause that’s what is gonna give you clues as to where to debug.

 

 

As the title suggests, this post is gonna be a massive dump on Apple. So lovers, fanatics and worshipers of the bitten apple may leave, this post might not please you very much. Or if you would like to read the story of the ex-Apple-fanboy, you may choose to stay. 

Once upon a time, not too long ago, there was a man by the name of Steve Jobs. His dream was simple; To empower the world with technology that is so mindblowingly simple that even a child can use it with ease. He led a bunch of guys to bring that vision to reality. Maybe he wasn’t the nicest of people, but he had a strong vision, and he had the ability to make people believe in that vision, in an almost cult-like fashion. Nevertheless, he was a futurist. He saw and imagined technology beyond that of his time, and was able to pull it off effectively.

Many criticised Jobs for being a profit-minded money-faced douche, primarily due to the exceptional pricing of Apple products. From a business perspective however, profit ensures a sustainable business model. Given the amount of R&D Apple devoted to every product, Apple justified the price of the product with their exceptional product and user experience design. Every product was a masterpiece. And the only reason that it was a masterpiece was because of the amount of resources devoted into innovation and development of the technology at Apple. So Jobs had his reasons for being profit-minded, he could not afford producing sub-par products.

Every Apple keynote event was like watching a magic show. You sit there knowing that you are there to watch magic, but you have no fucking idea what is gonna blow your mind this time round. And Jobs knew damn well how to put on a good show. From his theatrics to  his well-scripted deliveries, Jobs could captivate the audience every single time. And every product launch was something new.

Every new product was a show-stopper. Every other tech company would go into hiding if there were to be an Apple keynote around the corner. Everyone tried hard to imitate what Apple had perfected, but no one else came close to the level of innovation that Apple showcased.

On October 5th, 2011, the legendary Steve Jobs bid goodbye to the mortal world.

And Tim Cook took over as CEO of Apple. And the best thing Apple has done ever since was probably the San Francisco font. The gay-ass Cook (no pun intended) has led no innovation of sorts, apart from the multitude of innovations in marketing and pricing plans in order to pull in revenue. Jobs justified the revenue with top-class innovation, magic after magic. And recently Apple has just been pulling out nicely shaped and packaged poop, again and again.

I mean come on, the iPhone was a masterpiece. When it first came out in 2007.

And the greatest innovation that Apple could do with it was to make it bigger, thinner, faster, and plastic on one occasion. I mean every other phone out there has reimagined and rengineered the harder as well as software countless times, trying to innovate new ways of doing things. And the geniuses in Apple decided that they already got the best thing on the planet, and it’s best to just keep making it bigger and and thinner to make people feel better about themselves.

Okay now all those fuckers who said Steve Jobs was a money-faced douche, what are you gonna say about Apple now? Oh wait, you wouldn’t say anything probably cause you might be owning one of their products. Apple has definitely outshone every other company in their marketing and branding game, but the cult sort of died off since everyone has become a part of it now.

So what is the future of Apple. Well I’d say it is a pretty bleak one. They may be able to cover up their lack of innovation with excessive marketing and showmanship for a time being. But technology will eventually catch up with them, and tech giants such as Google and Microsoft will be eating up Apple if they don’t up their game.

Here’s to an Apple which makes Jobs proud.

Keep Glitching!

 

So everyone has been talking about coding. This is the “in thing”, and everyone is doing it. It can’t be that hard right. I mean if everyone is doing it then it should be relatively simple. So you decide to look up some online coding courses. Ah Codeacadamy! Looks neat, and easy to understand. You start on a HTML/CSS course, I mean what’s the point of coding if you can’t build your own website. You spend a few days following the tutorials closely, earning all those little badges which tell you that you have learnt something new. After a week or so you have successfully built a website. Wow! You did it! You managed to learn the basics of building a website. This is BIG!

It’s time to do it on your own. So you start building your own project, your own website. Oh this other site looks pretty cool let’s see if we can do this! Hmmm, okay you don’t think the course thought you this. Let’s try googling it. Woah okay! Nope this is just getting more confusing. All you want is for the freaking title to fade out when you scroll down, how hard can that be! What’s this jQuery bullshit all these sites are telling you about? And so you forget it and make do with something simpler. At least it’s something, not too bad right?

Months later, the greatest coding you ever did was that shitty website which was mostly off a web tutorial. This coding is hard, how did anyone even believe that anyone can code. Surely you weren’t born for this. This is not your thing at all.

All that sounds familiar? Well that was almost exactly what I went through when I first tried to pick up web development. And I realised why coding is such a nightmare for most first-timers.

Coding is an attitude.

Most people don’t realise that being a coder, or developer is not as much about the skills or talent to be able to program as much as it is about having the “coding attitude”. What is the “coding attitude”?

Accepting that you are a dumb piece of shit, and you cannot single-handedly control any circumstance.

Coding is no place for a person with ego. If you have ego about your knowledge or experience or expertise, the code will take a massive dump on your head. Every time you believe that you are right, the code will throw an error. Every time you think it will work, the code will give you a new glitch. Every single bug you fix, a new one pops up. When you have finally mastered that Javascript framework, it becomes deprecated and a new version is released.

So how to handle this? Accept that you have no control, and be open-minded. Coding is somewhat close to attaining a higher state of consciousness. A state of mind where you accept that you have no control over what happens, and you are ready to face whatever scenario thrown at you, with all the resources that you have at your disposal. The coding attitude is the “Come at me with all you got” attitude, knowing you don’t have much but you’re still going to do all it takes to tackle the issue. This is not something that is taught in schools, but it is a hard lesson that one learns after failing many times.

I would not say that I have mastered this attitude, but I am trying to believe in it and let it sink in. I feel that this attitude is something which can hold in all aspects of life, when looking at it from a broader perspective. No scenario or circumstance is ever within our control, however what is within our control is how we choose to react to the particular scenario. Whether we choose to get upset and frustrated, or if we spend that energy looking into ways of resolving the issue, is always within our control.

That’s exactly how you glorify the glitches 😉

Cheers till the next time!

Keep glitching!

You know the time when you’re going home after a long day at work, and your all time favourite jam comes up on the radio, and you feel like the king of the world? Or the other time you were feeling depressed, and this one song your friend had shared on Facebook seemed to talk about your entire life story? Or that time you went clubbing and the DJ drops the bass so good that every particle in your body feels exploded with energy and passion and the entire universe feels infinite? Okay maybe that was a little exaggerated, but you get my point.

Music has timelessly had the ability to connect and shape people. Regardless of societal background, whether you are waitressing at the local bar, or making millions at an investment firm, music touches, connects and flows through you.

But humans being programmed to be humans, we always need approval for the shit we do. So we go around judging and dissing others if they aren’t the same as us.

“Dude you listen to Justin bieber?? Are you gay or something?”

“What do you mean you’ve never heard of Metallica??”

“Look at these hipsters and their indie shit”

Okay yea, I admit I’m guilty of this myself.

Naturally we tend to connect with people whom agree to our tastes and preferences. And that’s perfectly fine. If death metal makes you feel infinite and immortal, then that’s awesome. Maybe pure instrumental alone is what you keeps you going through your day, that’s awesome too. Everyone has got their own tastes and preferences in everything they do.

But society doesn’t wanna let you listen to your music. Society wants to tell you that Taylor Swift is music and anything else is crap (no hate on Tay Tay). Society tells you that if you listen to EDM you gotta be some sort of a party animal or druggie/alcoholic. And all these hardcore fans take it to the internet to debate on what good music really is. And these debates can sometimes turn a little ugly, making very personal offensive insults towards the artists or musicians themselves. And the little judgement and insults become hatred and rage. Where does all this hatred come from?

Fear is the path to the dark side.

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

As Master Yoda said once, fear is the path to the dark side. Fear is the root of all negativity. Fear of societal acceptance. Fear of being different. Fear of losing your identity. And that fear acts as a motivation to hate on others, to judge and to diss and attack and shoot them down through all means.

In line with every prominent first step, “Hello World!”.

The history of “Hello World” is rather interesting. For something so widespread among the programming community, the term was first coined based on a reference made in a comic, by  Brian Kernighan,  renowned computer scientist whom played a major role in the development of the UNIX operating system.

Moving on from fun facts, I want to briefly introduce this blog as well as myself in this post. I hope that this post will serve as a sneak peak into the kind of things to expect from this blog, as well as remind the future me why I wanted this in the first place.

There were three main reasons that motivated me to start this blog. Firstly, it serves as means of documenting some of the many thoughts and realisations that having been recurring in the recent months. Secondly, I hope it acts as a personal progress gauge, in tracking how my thought process evolves through experiences and varying phases in life. And lastly, cause every other medium has become means of inflating egos rather than minds.

Therefore, “Glorified Glitches” was born.

What does that even mean? To be honest I didn’t really give it much thought, the name sort of stuck on to me and it sounded hipster enough. Maybe through the progress of the blog the name may change, or the posts may define the term. Hopefully the latter happens, that would be cool.

And with that, the rather generic post comes to an end. Haven’t given much thought about the next post yet, but I do hope to keep this ball rolling and not let friction and air resistance take control.

Till then, keep glitching!