A Little Bit Louder

I think for the first time since I’ve arrived, I had a “wow, that’s really beautiful” moment… i was sitting on this crowded bus and was looking through the front window, and i saw people just going about their business. Children were walking home from school. One man was carrying a large sack of who knows what. Some people were waiting for a bus. People just doing what they do, (or as some would say “That’s how they do”). Some music came on the radio… it was some indian music and started out with a long and somewhat melodic cry… almost as if to say “when will it end?”. It fit the moment…

Ordinary right? But there was something beautiful in the fact that they were doing things with simpler purposes. Most of them will probably go home to a basic meal, and a few chores and then to bed… only to start all over again. I’ve been thinking quite a bit over the last few months about the concept of “singular focus”.

Singular focus is when you have one main focus in your life. The vast majority of your activities, relationships/interactions, time, energy, and resources are then arranged to make that one focus successful. I don’t think I’ve done that very well this past year, both in choosing a focus, but also in arranging my life.

The most significant times of growth in my life have been times when I’ve been in a period where I was living with singular focus. Times like university, camp, europe, or missions trips, that have all been in one way or another significant to the shaping of my character and perception of live and people. Whether it was a few days or a few months, having a singular focus allowed me to sort out and see what was and wasn’t important in my life.

I feel like the first few days in Nepal have been starting to get my life back to that. The objectives are simple, and while the execution of those objectives are more complex, the simplicity of the vision is a good foundation to come back to.

The question then, is what does my life look like if I were to have singular focus permanently?

I sat in with Mark’s tech training class this morning. It was a little bit like being back in school at waterloo, though now I know more, and I’m not the one with a blank look on my face. There was Bikesh, Binod, and Asish. They seemed to be getting the hang of good web design and how to use different resources to accomplish a task. They’re eager to learn, but sometimes look lost… and when Mark told them about the big project they have coming up, and all that needs to be accomplished, they looked rather worried. It doesn’t seem like much work to me, but then again I’ve been coding for years. I have to remember what it was like in my first few co-op jobs learning the ropes and getting my feet wet in “real world” projects.

I spent the afternoon with Ganga looking at shelving options for the grocery store.

I'm new to RSS and feeds and such, so it took me a bit to find out how to tie in my flickr account to this blog. Turns out it's easier than I though. Near the bottom of your Flickr photo page, you will see something like:

"Feeds - Subscribe to James' photos"

Right click on the link and select "Copy Link Location". Next you need to add the Flickr sidebar. Where it says "Feed url" enter the link location you copied. It will be something like this:

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=12345678@N00&format=rss_200

That's all there is to it.

When setting up Typo, you may encounter this error when trying to run rake migrate:

rake aborted!
Mysql::Error: INDEX command denied to user 'username'@'localhost' 
for table 'articles': CREATE  INDEX `articles_permalink_index` 
ON articles (`permalink`)

This means the user, that Typo is running as, doesn't have permissions to create an index. So go into mysql and run the following:

update user set Create_priv='Y' where User='username';
update user set Index_priv='Y' where User='username';

where 'username' is the username that your Typo is running under. Finally, don't forget to flush your privileges:

flush privileges;

Your migrate should now work...