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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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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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..

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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
})

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(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz 

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(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz

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

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(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz

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

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(c) 2004-2010 i.m ruzz

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(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz

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Shop 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.

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(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz (All Rights Reserved)

when i started working with models back in 2004 I felt like i had a lot of initial success without a lot of work--success at a beginners level, of course--and a lot of my photos were well received which had the undesired effect of becoming a psychological block or creative paralytic. From what i've read this loosely translates to the sophomore jinx. Where you produce beyond expectations early on and then get lost in the feedback loop in your own head. Trapped between past successes--however small, they're measured--and the absence of tools or knowledge to move to the next level. 

we've all seen it happen in sports. we've all seen the one hit wonders in music. and we've all fallen in love with an authors first book ( see silk, and white oleander ) only to never find that quality later. We're social beings at our core and as such we don't create in a vacuum. You'll often hear artists, or other creative types say they don't care what people think but i think this is betrayed on some level by the act of creation which is really a desire for expression. there are very few artists in any medium that create purely for themselves. 

they do exist, I can't recall his name just now but theres a scottish artist who creates a fixed number of works to feed his established art world needs and make rent, the rest of the time he's out in nature making art out of found materials, working sometimes for days in conditions that ensure the piece will be destroyed soon (in the documentary i watched he built an intricate, and beautiful structure from driftwood on the shores of scotland racing against the incoming tide, only to complete it and have it washed out to sea). but on the whole we create things to express something to ourselves, and others. 

the sophomore jinx is further exacerbated, i think, by the fact that the conditions around the artist change as they find success and perhaps the things that drove them to create a particular mood or feeling are impossible. We watched U2 go from a band solidifying our anger over our impotence in the world to popmart, for example. 

while i've never found any sort of financial success from my photography, and i'm not actively seeking any, I still feel trapped by my own work from time to time. Having just went through a wonderful love affair--i watched as the comfort of having love, and proximity to the feminine, drained me of my fascination with the subject that my work turns on. Deprived, as it were, of my loneliness, and my solitude, and that aching need for beauty I felt directionless and without any real motivator to work. 

I was able to realize the consumate male photographer fantasy of having a love affair with one of his muses for sure. And documenting that was exciting and fulfilling but you quickly reach a saturation point where things begin to break apart. proximity breeds familiarity and while that can spur the challenge of looking deeper in some, if you're ready for that, it only sapped me of the inexorable passion to explore the feminine. 

There's not time enough to decode my motivation toward that in the first place so lets just assume for now thats a driving factor, whatever it's root causes. 

coming full round now, I want to relate a concept that helped me through that early period of tangled motivations and and helps me again now. It's the release of framing things as an experiment. 

whatever your field of focus, photography or code, or woodwork, or music, it most likely found its genesis in some form of curiosity. and once that curiosity was unfettered by the trappings of the world you eventually built around an area focused study. And the key to releasing those trappings is to release the need to serve that world.

I've often found myself working (code) on holidays, much like i will today and the system I have to justify that, beyond a desire to get paid, is to reframe the context of that particular day. I take the working holiday as a chance to follow any part of an idea that i have curiosity about. it's a game of "what if". you disconnect the outcome from the act. today i'm going to explore some ideas i have that may or may not bring me closer to completion of this particular project but will certainly add knowledge about how some things fit together in general. my curiosity is motivation enough by itself.  

and I find I can do this reasonably well because i've trained myself to treat most shoots that way. There's often that nagging anxiety before a shoot about what might come of it. will you find your way to that rhythm, that flow of beauty and light? will the model relax and give you something honest?

the only reasonable defense to that anxiety is to release any attachment to the outcome. To let go of a need to meet tacit standards, or come away with something concretely valuable. In doing so, you can begin to reconnect to your natural curiosity, and play. curiosity and play are the grounds for finding a way outside your self. really, you need to be willing to destroy yourself, or your idea of yourself every time you put the camera to your eye, or open an editor. pick up a knife to widdle, or a pencil to sketch. 

and here's the little grain of subtext thats so hard to articulate: you cannot grow into the next version of your self so long as you are rooted firmly in an idea of who this current self is. Becoming known for a particular style of work, or speciality, will often trap you into creating only that style or speciality( see francis wiley ). The more acutely aware you are of the things you expect of yourself, and others expect of you, the less real experimentation you're willing to engage in. what a special kind of hell it would be to be robert deniro or jack nicholson, forever trapped in the confines of being deniro, or nicholson. forever trying to maintain. 

the sweet paradox here is that you only truly uncover your potential, and glimpse your full capability through the throwing off of ideas of your potential, and capabilities and placing yourself firmly in the unknown. creation of any kind is an expression of you meeting your edges in "doing" then captured through some medium. pencil, photos, code, human relationships. everything else is servicing and maintaining ideas. 

go play, and find out who you really are...

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(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz (all rights reserved)

eddie is slowly becoming a regular. that's not bad. aside from the obvious hole in the center of my muse roster, we've had a pretty interesting relationship from the start. our first shoot felt like a bust, and theres been large gaps in getting to know one another. From my view though every time i shoot her i find something new in her, and I know i over use the phrase "the model is the concept", but it's really true. and in this case, eddie's inability to hide behind herself comes through for me and that makes it worth doing. not everyone i work with repeatedly is always a study in where that person is in their life at a particular time--which defeats repeated shooting--but i think i'm getting there with her. 

as an aside, an interesting experience for photographers to try out is to set all your lights up as normal, and shoot for a while in one configuration till you're happy. then kill all the modelling lights and ambient lights so it's you and the model in the dark (you're best to stay stationary and have her somewhere she can move around safely). then just shoot. 

the effect is getting a lot of discards, because you have no idea where she is when you fire. but when you do hit something the value is you get to slip out of your normal framing and normal context but keep your established light. i guarantee shooting like this for 50 frames or so will produce a few images that will work. The ones that work will show you what it would be like if someone else had your exact setup but used another set of eyes to frame/compose the shot. in this case that someone else is the dark. but the results are the are educational. you may uncover some tendencies in your composition that might be blocking you from uncovering more interesting shots.  

try it.  

note: the above shot was not a shot in the dark, but i will be posting some in a set to show you what i mean. 

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(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz (all rights reserved)

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(c) 2004-2010 i.m. ruzz

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