ruzz' stream of semi-consciousness http://stream.ruzz.org when you give up caring, you give up.. caring. posterous.com Mon, 18 Oct 2010 11:00:00 -0700 The ways in which we cheat our users. The developers dirty lie. http://stream.ruzz.org/the-ways-in-which-we-cheat-our-users-the-deve http://stream.ruzz.org/the-ways-in-which-we-cheat-our-users-the-deve It's been interesting watching Rebeca Murphy of yayQuery fame go through the shift from script kiddie to developer. To watch her exploration, under the bright lights, of the things all developers go through. I looked over her slides from the Boston jquery event (http://www.slideshare.net/mobile/rmurphey/functionality-basedorg) and was really hoping she happened upon something interesting in her travels. What she happened upon was MVC. She calls them mediators (controllers), views (views), services (models) under the guise of functionality based organization but in reality it's just plain old MVC. two things occurred to me while reviewing the slides. First, it seems a massive portion of most programmers thought process is devoted to not writing code. I see this everywhere. It's cloaked in various ways, such as mvc or abstraction, or dry, or agile but what it really boils down to is programmers don't like to write code. Were always looking for cleaner ways to implement, maintain, and refactor our code and our conceptual framework about application design. The larger portion of all tech blogs and conferences seem focused on this goal. And, having developed in some form or more for over two decades it's something I've come to assume is part of the life of a programmer. But here's the second thing that occurred to me. It's pretty much bullshit. Most web applications, and by most, I mean 99.5% don't end up being maintained in any long term way. Over half never make it to market. Of the half that do, many live on in their basic form for a while but never blossom into anything more than what they were originally developed to do. Then are replaced or negated. Those few which survive face massive change over time and likely are unrecognizable to the original developers. How much original code do you suppose exists in facebook or Twitter? The sad truth of our industry is we are navel gazers. We're hyper focused on architecture and implementation while project failure rates are astoundingly high. We massive efforts on learning, growing and improving how we do things and tell ourselves it's for the betterment of the applications. It's not. It's fear management. Big codebases are scary to the human mind. There's so much context required to have room to breathe and gaining that context requires a big psychological commitment on the part of developers. Bigger than were really comfortable with and so we look for ways to abstract out that complexity through patterns, systems and conventions. We spend inordinate effort battling reality because its too terrible to face. The reality is most modern web development is pretty simple computationally. Our tools have improved greatly and you don't require a CS degree to build most things we approach. However, what has sent changed is the scope of context. The mental demands put on developers to keep context outstrips our ability regularly and so we seek ways to lessen that strain via patterns and systems. At the end of the day though, what I've come to see after so long in the muck, is we can't find relief from contextual strain this way. Slice the problem into smaller and smaller chunks, till it appears manageable but in the end you still have the same amount of context to jam into your brain, only now it's wrapped in seven layers of abstraction and parsed out into numerous patterns you must have accurately and reliably implemented--but no one ever does, so we must double check our double checking. The problem of contextual complexity, or more succinctly, the amount of organized information about your problem domain, implementation and the layers spanning between them cannot be wished away. You can hide it, obscure it, parcel it, but you can't escape it. And in trying you spend vital mental energy that counts against both your capacity and your project resources. The resulting wreckage of our industry wide shirking of reality is developer burnout, massively missed deadlines and horrendous project failure rates. And one other tiny thing we forget in all this... The people who use our software, and their needs. the real consequence of our denial is that despite the brainpower, and tools, most software for most people is borderline unusable, or worse, fails to address their needs in ways that matter. To say nothing about the opportunity lost by not presenting users with software that enables them to exceed what we conceived for them in the first place. We love how mashups explode our concepts of two or more applications once joined, but ignore our app combined with each human that uses it is in fact a mashup. Each unique mind brings new possibility, but the way we fixate on implementation over experience we leave little room for use imagination and most often when we see their imagination poke through our app it's in the form of a bug, more mental weight. this observation I've made comes to you as just that. I offer no solution beyond perhaps raising the question of where our true motivations lie as developers. Ourselves, and our escapist tendencies when confronted with complexity (or more accurately contextual depth). I wonder what sort of apps we'd make if we spent less time on our fear of code and more on solving user needs. If we shifted our focus from a race away from spagetti code and extensibility and on to project completion, and deep mining of user need. There are probably many spelling and grammatical errors above, I wrote this unexpectedly long blog from my iPad and fighting it's spell checker and odd responses to my typing will remain as they sit as a sort of testament to what I said above.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Sat, 16 Oct 2010 09:06:00 -0700 jQuery 1.4.3 is out, here's why i care http://stream.ruzz.org/jquery-143-is-out-heres-why-i-care-4 http://stream.ruzz.org/jquery-143-is-out-heres-why-i-care-4

another "minor" release in the 1.4.x line -- read the blog for more details: http://blog.jquery.com/2010/10/16/jquery-143-released/

it's got some cool stuff in it, and shows to me that the jQuery team has their shit together in a huge way. They call a release like this minor, where a lot of development teams would consider that much work a substantial release. In any case, I don't normally bother to write about release updates, but there's something pretty juicy in this one relating indirectly to templating via a small change in the .data() methods. 

first imagine a template like:

<div id="user" data-id="1" data-name="John">
Hi  {{name}}
</div>

previously you had to monkey about doing things like var id = $('#user").attr('data-id'); to get that id and pass it to your templating engine. if you were passing several bits of data this could be tedious so you probably improved the above template to look like this:

<div id="user" data-user="{ id: '1', name:'john'}">
Hi  {{name}}
</div>

allowing you to pull all your attributes in one object, but you still had to manually pull your attributes all the time. 

enter 1.4.3 and all html 5 data attributes (you have been using the data-xxx format right?) are automagically read into the elements .data() object. this seems minor but is going to save a lot of tedious work because if the above template is used now you can just call $('#user').data('user'); and have access to all those values right out of the gate. 

sometimes small intuitive changes have the biggest impact. 

I can immediately go through some code on the app i'm working on and trim out a bunch of .attr() calls saving me code. but more interestingly anywhere i've already been using the html5 data tags (and i have) i already have access to those as data if i need them and this is key for me. It encourages the proper use of a new standard (html5) and rewards you for adopting it early with less work. We need more improvements in our tools along this line because it's the quickest way to get new standards to be "the" standard. 

when you couple changes like the above with speed improvements and implementation improvements (like becoming more compatible with CommonJS) and changes borne from your user bases expectations (Calling .data(Object) no longer completely replaces the data object instead it extends the existing object, leaving the unspecified values in place) you get a really great project to work with, even for minor releases. 

 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Tue, 05 Oct 2010 14:34:57 -0700 Gord Downie & The Country of Miracles, Calgary, AB 2010 http://stream.ruzz.org/gord-downie-the-country-of-miracles-calgary-a http://stream.ruzz.org/gord-downie-the-country-of-miracles-calgary-a all images (c) 2004-2010 i.m ruzz 

Gord and the gang played Mac Hall here in Calgary last night. Managed to get right up front to the right and get some good shots. It was a great show. 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Fri, 17 Sep 2010 19:05:00 -0700 on remembering disjointed and damaged light and weak knee'd promise. http://stream.ruzz.org/on-remembering-disjointed-and-damaged-light-a http://stream.ruzz.org/on-remembering-disjointed-and-damaged-light-a

Ruzz5421
(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz
Model: Katie West 

finally getting a chance to look over some older pictures. I'm layed up sick with a bad chest cold and over the last three days I've managed to rescue all my photos from the last 2 years which were trapped on another machine. First time I've been able to look through or work on these shots in several months and now with some time passed, and my life completely changed since we shot in April, I see these shots differently. 

It was a harried shoot. I was on the tail end of a very busy and wearing week long trip out east for work. My life was overly complicated. I'd stepped into an emotional mire by following my curiosity and that combined with a lot of change in my work I think i was near complete collapse that night. I did end up coming apart, but not for another week or so. 

Being in a strange city, in an overpriced hotel room, needing food and sleep. Drinking wine and wandering around the hotel looking for places we might exploit (read: no cameras) I remember thinking how surreal everything about my life felt. let alone that I was in this ridiculous hotel with a bare minimum of light and Katie West. I felt adrift. completely detached from the mores that normally framed my life. exhausted, and mostly drained of passion. Surely deeply disconnected from beauty. 

we had the awkwardness of two people who barely know one another off the internet. the complexity and constraint of time and energy, and Katie mentioned she hadn't shot with another photographer in a long time and I remember thinking we should just go walk around and take pictures together and shoo all this other stuff away. she could show me this city I'd hated from a distance for years, and I could escape the weight of people expecting something transcendent from a situation completely mis-aligned. 

She was friendly, and welcoming. we got on okay but I never felt we really connected. I felt like we should, but never felt like we really did. I didn't hit that sweet spot during the shoot where you are able to fully let go and just follow the flow. I was overly aware of her. Overly aware of me. 

so now, many months later, and the pressure released, expectations burned through, my life upside down but more resembling what i think my life is actually like it's a strange thing to look at these shots. I see shots of katie, and the old stone of the financial district of Toronto. The weeping trees who lull their nourishment from the great lakes. In the inky black shadows i see expressed my own darkness at the time. I see now, having lost most of the edits I had in place from April, and seeing the raw files anew, and realize how an otherwise unremarkable shoot has come a symbol in my mind about who I am, who i was trying to be, and how far the two can get from one another. 

I'd love a second chance to shoot Katie. On my turf. She can come into the shithole I call my home (or studio if you're cute) and I can put lights around her and have a chance to express something besides my utter disorientation. I'd love the chance to actually see katie, and shoot her for who she is, rather than what happened which was me on autopilot trying to keep my shit together while running almost entirely on nothing but the malformed energy that comes from having no other way to be when you're in over your head in every realm of your life.  

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Tue, 07 Sep 2010 01:33:00 -0700 Book Review: The Female Thing by Laura Kipnis http://stream.ruzz.org/book-review-the-female-thing-by-laura-kipnis http://stream.ruzz.org/book-review-the-female-thing-by-laura-kipnis

The Female Thing: Dirt, Envy, Sex, Vulnerability (Vintage)The Female Thing: Dirt, Envy, Sex, Vulnerability by Laura Kipnis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kipnis is the sort of woman I'd enjoy watching dissect a crowd of intellectuals, then sitting back and discussing it with her. Her mind, and tongue are razor sharp and she has that mystical ability to see what's plain behind the show and pomp of a lot of modern thought. No small feat.

Against Love, her poorly named polemic against relationships, or more specifically against marriage--though titled so--was a rip roaring ride of research, biting wit, cleverness and general disregard for the common expectations of good behaviour when dealing with topics like love and marriage. If you haven't read it, do.

This short book never quite reached the fevered pitch of Against Love, and in some senses you could almsot feel her stepping gingerly lest she engage the entire feminist cadre against her. The closest she gets to her true form of freewheeling intellectual destruction is in the chapter about the elusive female orgasm. The farthest while discussing rape. An uneven pace despite the brevity of the book.

However, I think the book might be good primer to anyone interested in gender studies. Particularly as a jumping off point to other works that might expand more deeply.

she ends the book with a valid description of a couple paradoxes of the modern idea of women as viewed through the lens of feminism and declares from that point is where a true look at the issue must begin. An odd sort of way to end a book. A page taken from the fluff passing as a heavy-handed appeal for a trilogy ala Angelina Jolie's Salt perhaps? Whetting our appetites for her real next novel? or testing the grounds to see how much flame is roused from this?

a couple interesting threads of thought:

1. the idea that the preternatural mother instinct and mother bonding with child is actually a convenient construction of modern (or recent, historically at least) thought.

2. that until the 1920s a goodly part of a doctors work was to deal with feminine hysteria. The cure for which was often manual genital massage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_hyst...

there are many more interesting morsels layered throughout the book and while they all tend toward her case--if she was actually making a case--even combined they failed, for me, to raise a coherent thread of thought in any particular direction. this is more like a review of the state of things than a discorse, or argument put forth. which in some way is a shame as where kipnis shines brightest is when she's dismantling some unsuspecting hacks work with the sheer violence of her thought.

alas, perhaps the next book..

View all my reviews

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:39:26 -0700 A walk through downtown http://stream.ruzz.org/a-walk-through-downtown http://stream.ruzz.org/a-walk-through-downtown All Photos (c) 2004-2010 i.m ruzz

I had to drop off the car I had for the last week downtown so I brought my cameras. The K20D had a 12-24mm Wide Angle on it and I was fortunate to find good clouds when I got down there. I dropped the car and took about 80 pictures in the short walk to my bus stop. I dragged it out as this so far looks to be one of the few breaks I get this long weekend. I was pretty happy that wide angle never sold because i'm getting back into the distorted wide angle feel lately. 

As an interesting aside, there was a massive owl atop the McDougal Center (North Side) and I was pretty stoked to see one downtown, but less so when i realized i opted to save 600g im weight in my shoulder bag by leaving my 75-300 at home. oh well, I bet he hangs out there a lot. 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:08:23 -0700 Untitled http://stream.ruzz.org/27162707 http://stream.ruzz.org/27162707
Photo

(c) 2004-2010 i.m ruzz
Model: Marla Singer

Been playing with some of the nifty editing apps on the iPad. Generally dislike double exposure but there was something about this one.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Mon, 30 Aug 2010 14:52:55 -0700 sure it's wrong, but i'm still using it http://stream.ruzz.org/sure-its-wrong-but-im-still-using-it http://stream.ruzz.org/sure-its-wrong-but-im-still-using-it
Ruzz8857

(c) 2004-2010

Docile deer in Waterton Townsite, AB.

So doug and i were driving through the townsite of Waterton, exploring, and we happened across a deer just sitting in the grass of the campground. Chillin, like it wasn't surrounded by humans. We pulled over and approached to take pictures. it was unbothered by our closeness. Completely. We stalked out through the RV park and found several more that weren't even bothered when people walked by with dogs. Doug roused a baby bambi that was sleeping under the slide out part of a 5th wheel and it was calling for mama, a bit distressed but mama never came and it wandered off. 

I couldn't get over the feeling something was completely wrong with the whole situation. That didn't stop me from using it to get some decent shots of animals I most often just have blurred running away shots of. Still, as we drove through the townsite and saw a baseball field with a dozen or so, fawns as well, mixed with a number of people walking around with their compact cameras snapping away I was mildly unsettled about these wild animals so comfortable with their worst predator. 

I guess that happens in places like waterton. They come in, sanctioned and safe by way of tourists over hunters, and UNESCO World Heritage sites and realize life is pretty cushy in town. Less bears, less cougars. Dinner comes in the form of healthy cultivated lawns and i'm sure carrots and various handouts from humans. But you'd think part of being a national park would mean they would care for the welfare of the wildlife. and letting these swarms of deer behave this way is not in the interest of the animals, nor their young. I'm too old to be surprised to see the supposed keepers of something allowing it to be entirely corrupt--but i'm still slightly bothered by it. 

The irony is if i had decided to kill and eat one I'd be the one up on charges. 

good thing I prefer elk anyways. 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Sun, 29 Aug 2010 14:52:51 -0700 Prince of Wales Hotel, Waterton, AB. http://stream.ruzz.org/prince-of-wales-hotel-waterton-ab http://stream.ruzz.org/prince-of-wales-hotel-waterton-ab
Ruzz8783

(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz

we didn't actually stay there--too expensive--but man it's pretty sitting out on that bluff like that. Not sure I will have the patience to work through the pictures tonight, but here's a sampler. 

many thanks to my boy dougie for the bday trip. If you haven't already picked up your own Doug, you should. they're actually better than advertised most of the time ;)

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Sun, 22 Aug 2010 12:41:00 -0700 programming concepts: jQuery.delegate http://stream.ruzz.org/programming-concepts-jquerydelegate http://stream.ruzz.org/programming-concepts-jquerydelegate

i've long thought the real battle of becoming a great programmer comes in ingesting the right concepts. most programmers are pretty clever and once they grok something in a way that makes sense to them theres a moment of clarity and inspiration that comes from seeing all the interesting ways you they could apply this new idea. this process is the heart of programmer growth. Ignoring the cruft, those programmers who treat programming as a job, it's clear the real impediment to growth is getting the right conceptual explanation (through books, tutorials, play, experiments, blogs, et al). When we have the right conceptual model, complex ideas become simple and practical. your conceptual model is the expression of your understanding of the things you're working with and determines what calibre of programmer you're going to become. 

Interestingly, most top programmers rely on code to explain themselves because articulating their latent conceptual framework is either impossible, or the outline of it is so deeply stacked on other concepts it's like explaining the evolution of western philosophy. This conceptual stack problem is hard to get around. You can't accurately explain many sophisticated concepts without leaning on an underlying stack of other sophisticated concepts. Imagine giving Javascript: the good parts to a very junior programmer. They don't have a the basic concepts upon which much of the book relies and would get little from it. 

to that end, I've been thinking about a series of conceptual posts trying to boil an idea down to it's simplest conceptual explanation--which, im learning is often harder than the code itself to come up with. Lets give this a try with the oft misunderstood, but incredible helpful jQuery.delegate function. 

The existing concept:

from the api docs: http://api.jquery.com/delegate/

Delegate is an alternative to using the .live() method, allowing for each binding of event delegation to specific DOM elements. 

.delegate( selector, eventType, handler )

selectorA selector to filter the elements that trigger the event.

eventTypeA string containing one or more space-separated JavaScript event types, such as "click" or "keydown," or custom event names.

handlerA function to execute at the time the event is triggered.

$("table").delegate("td", "hover", function(){
        $(this).toggleClass("hover");
})

the above snippet will listen for hover events against "table" and fire the enclosed code when they happen. super clear right?

A new  concept:

jQuery.delegate is all about efficiency. I'm going to use the concept of a teacher and a classroom of students to lay this out in simple terms. Lets start by imagining a theres a teacher in a classroom that needs to know when each student is done their tests. Theres two ways to approach this:

  1. give each student individual instructions, one a time, to come tell the teacher when they're done.
  2. put instruction on the board for the everyone in the class telling them to come up and tell the teacher when they're done.

which is more efficient and flexible? in the first scenario what happens if another student comes into the room (perhaps by ajax :P) to take the test after the instructions have been given individually? and what happens if we change our minds about what the student needs to do when the test is done? do we have to go back and individually explain the new instructions?

lets try this as a bit of code:

 

$("classroom").delegate("student", "doneTheTest", function(){
        $(this).tellTheTeacher();  //$(this) == the student thats done right now
})

what we're saying is any student in the classroom thats done test should tell the teacher. If a new student comes in, they're covered by the same rules because they are in the "classroom". If we want to change our instructions, we change it once for all students, even the new ones because the instuctions aren't followed till they are done the test. 

thats all you need to know to apply this concept and get around a lot of unsightly code handling individual items. If you're curious why it works this way, you should follow up with some reading on event bubbling in javascript. but theres no reason you need to understand that to leverage the power of delegate. 

the one line concept:
anytime you have a group of things you want to watch for something, delegate it to the container they all belong to. 

I hope to roll out a few more of these as time permits. Right now i'm heavy into jQuery so I think the next one will be the oft misunderstood, but wow powered jQuery.data() which has the power to transform the very way you think about the dom and your data. 

 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:01:33 -0700 m. singer http://stream.ruzz.org/m-singer-1 http://stream.ruzz.org/m-singer-1
Ruzz6805

(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz 

model: Marla Singer

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:04:02 -0700 John Resig's jQuery Ninja talk at Tec... | Zoopy | Share videos, photos and audio clips http://stream.ruzz.org/john-resigs-jquery-ninja-talk-at-tec-zoopy-sh http://stream.ruzz.org/john-resigs-jquery-ninja-talk-at-tec-zoopy-sh
via zoopy.com

the deeper you go down the javascript application hole, the closer i think you get to the idea that the dom and the data are the same. MVC patterns start to fall apart. if you watch this watch at least to the part where he explains the logic of the small game he wrote. it's a gamble he's taking by being a heretic, but one i think he'll win in the end.

as an aside, isn't in troubling or, interesting, that this was shot at the tech4africa confrence and almost everyone in the audience is white, middle aged men.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:39:26 -0700 untitled http://stream.ruzz.org/26058340 http://stream.ruzz.org/26058340
Ruzz8254

(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz

model: Kara Yerex

not dead, just busy. 

why are smoking girls 3x sexier than non smoking girls?

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Sat, 14 Aug 2010 20:31:16 -0700 Mini-Review: The Big C, A new series from Showtime staring Laura Linney and Oliver Platt http://stream.ruzz.org/mini-review-the-big-c-a-new-series-from-showt http://stream.ruzz.org/mini-review-the-big-c-a-new-series-from-showt
Media_httpwwwshocomsi_zhiyn
via sho.com

caught the first ep of this on my break. Pretty good start. If you like Laura Linney, and you like Oliver Platt--and if you don't like Ollie, what do you like?--then you probably will dig this.

it's hard to do a show about Cancer without being a bit contrived and trite, but i think the actors keep it mostly out of cliche land.

i particularly enjoyed when she told the gir from precious (who i think needs to die) that she could either be fat and jolly or skinny and bitch, but fat and bitch was not an option.

"fat people are jolly for a reason.." she says.

despite the fat bashing (the last respectable form of bigotry and prejudice, and the obvious paradox that she's breaking up with her chubby husband because he's too jolly while playing video games and and acting like an over grown man-child aside, it was pretty good.

it's hard not to identify with seeing someone stuck, become unstuck and follow the ineluctable course that follows. Humans for whatever reason identify with the sentiment of "Screw it, i'm going hard" almost universally. my question is how can they keep that going over the length of a series.

if it were an hbo series, we'd know they only had 2 1/2 seasons before they were cancelled because studio chiefs got distracted by some other shiny thing, but this is showtime.. oh wait.. who remembers huff?

and there was a lot of boob hanging out. that helped.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Thu, 12 Aug 2010 10:32:29 -0700 waking up you http://stream.ruzz.org/waking-up-you http://stream.ruzz.org/waking-up-you

Ruzz8028
(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz (All Rights Reserved)
model: eddie

I had wrote out a long post, then decided to delete it. 

 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Tue, 10 Aug 2010 21:23:00 -0700 jeff http://stream.ruzz.org/jeff-tag-ruzz-portrait-pen-jeff http://stream.ruzz.org/jeff-tag-ruzz-portrait-pen-jeff

P8104580

(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz

went for a ride with my nephew tonight, me on the bike, him on his longboard. We hit up a couple places i'd made note of for portraits--so he got himself a couple portraits. 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:32:17 -0700 untitled http://stream.ruzz.org/25309607 http://stream.ruzz.org/25309607
Ruzz8452

(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz
model: kara yerex

will posterous autopost this like it should. only god knows. 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Sun, 08 Aug 2010 20:37:09 -0700 untitled http://stream.ruzz.org/25257360 http://stream.ruzz.org/25257360
Ruzz8619

(c) 2004-2010 i.m ruzz

model: kara yerex

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Sun, 08 Aug 2010 15:24:15 -0700 the reunion http://stream.ruzz.org/the-reunion http://stream.ruzz.org/the-reunion
P8074470

(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz

model: kara yerex

our last shoot was November 2007. It was the shoot that set me back working after a major illness if not prematurely. I barely remember the shoot beyond the photos that came from it; I was on a lot of pain killers at the time. It's always interesting to return to a model after some time has passed. You get to see how they've changed or grown, and get to see how your approach has evolved (or devolved, whichever). The first time i shot Kara i was using a borrowed Nikon D70 camera which had no experience with. The next, if i recall right we were using 500W drywaller's lights, then the last shoot where i finally got to light her with actual strobes everything came together. 

This shoot i felt as aware of the small space i work in as I've ever been. Kara's very fluid and uses all the space you give her, and there wasn't much space at all. It's interesting to see how different models require different environments to really thrive. The more space you give her the more expressive she can be, whereas some models the more space you give the more lost the feel. 

I've also been wondering how it got to be August and I haven't put together an outdoor shoot yet. For some reason I feel unmotivated to deal with the extra burden shooting outside carries. relying on found spaces, less focused or style-able light, carting a small village of gear around, and fending off the mosquitos. Every other year as soon as it became warm enough to move outside--I couldn't wait and i'm unsure where the reluctance is coming from. I hope i don't end up shooting outside and feeling i wasted the summer by not getting to it earlier. this is particularly paradoxical considering how deeply tired i am of the constraints of my apartment as a location. 

theres a lot of voodoo that has to be invoked to make an incredibly small place look even remotely different than the same place you used last shoot, and the 12 shoots before that. voodoo = extra work and extra distraction. it's well past time to get moved out of here.

I felt really good about what we came up with in the end, but the constant friction of the space is wearing on me as I've been shooting once a week for the last little while as my main use the little bit of free time i have. At some point in the near future I hope to either set up a focused photoblog to give me a place to push pictures to more often, or actually get a working site going at favoritesin.ca--can't decide which makes more sense. 

speaking of reunions, way way back I shot a suicide girl named rin. she's moved back to town now and we're discussing a timeline for shooting. That would be really interesting because i was never happy with our first shoot. there was virtually no light and i was riding on natural light, and i was still so inexperienced with models that i got all tangled up in myself. I can't even look at the pictures from that shoot any more. it hurts. 

in case you can't tell, today i'm supposed to be working but having trouble getting going. I gotta work out how to get more than one day off a week. 

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz Tue, 03 Aug 2010 10:43:00 -0700 Book Review: Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford http://stream.ruzz.org/book-review-shop-class-as-soulcraft-by-matthe http://stream.ruzz.org/book-review-shop-class-as-soulcraft-by-matthe

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of WorkShop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

the first 80 pages or so present some really fascinating ideas about the value of physical work. The last 120 pages become an argument for his failure from academia meant for his dead father, and a whole lot of bike mechanic masturbation.

Several of his key arguments are shaky at best and he uses his estimable intellect to bend the world to his theories. They'd have taught him how to avoid doing that, perhaps, if he'd saw his post secondary education through. ah, who am i kidding..

having said all that, i think it's worth buying and reading for those 80 pages because some of the ideas he puts out there are important, and lucid (when not being trumped up).

in particular his points on the value of study towards mastery on the "quality" of ones life, and how the road to mastery is paved with submission of the self to something other than the self. There are other smaller but equally interesting concepts like our modern fixation on the removal of psychic irritants.

he uses the metaphor of the oil dipstick-less mercedes benz, but the point could be applied easily to nearly anything. Modern humans are fixated on not having anything even remotely abrasive in their lives. this drive toward a frictionless life has far reaching consequences and it could be the topic of an entirely separate book but this is the first time i've seen anyone point it out so clearly.

there are a number of weighty gems of thought buried in talk of grease and bike repair. If you can tolerate the irritation that comes from having to dig through this meaningless (to non mechanics) chatter and keep a notebook handy to grab good thought jumping off points, it's worth the purchase price.

View all my reviews >>

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/597936/light_session_039.jpg http://posterous.com/users/5AqlMZNsWVSp i.m. ruzz ruzz i.m. ruzz