About Rob Larsen
Day Job
Currently, I work at Molecular. I make web sites. Formerly I was the Principal Presentation Engineer at Cramer. At Cramer I managed a small team of front end and Flash developers. We built web sites. Prior to that I worked as a consultant for companies like Gillette, State Street, The Museum of Science, Boston and Compete. Check out HTML + CSS + JavaScript for more details.
Art
I do graffiti style art and my own brand of cartoon style art on canvas. I've shown at several events in the Boston area, including all of the Legends of Style shows alongside artists like Seen, Cope2, Blade, T-Kid, Rickey Powell, Sever, Tracy 168, Ces, Med, Sever, Kem5, Alert, Vault, Alone, Percy Fortini Wright, Sly and Rath. Here's a full list of shows I've taken part in:
- "Paint It Now" March 19 - April 29, 2010 The Distillery Gallery,South Boston, MA
- FutureArts 2009 @ The Roxy
- ComNGraf 2 September 27, 2008
- Future Classic Gallery Sale 2 / June 4, 2008
- Legends of Style Boston / April 26th, 2008 @ The Boston Center For The Arts
- FutureArts 2008 April 18 and 19, 2008 @ The Boston Center For The Arts
- Hit the Deck- Winter Music Conference, 2008.3.28 @ The Catalina Hotel in Miami, FL
- Hit the Deck- SXSW, 2008.3.13 @ Light Bar in Austin, TX
- Boston Urban Art Festival Saturday, December 8, 2007
- Hit the Deck Custom Skateboards November 15, 2007
- Sneak(er) Peek II
- Legends of Style Boston 2007: Surreal City
- Urban Art Experiments Volume 2 (Detroit)
- Rekloos Rocks your Toy Box (kid robot) show
- Legends of Style Fall 2006: Future Shock
- Legends of Style Spring 2006: ICONS
- Legends of Style Fall 2005
- Legends of Style Spring 2005
- Future Classic September 2003
I've been interviewed dozens of times for everything from school papers to web sites and newspapers about the subject of graffiti art. My comments on the subject have appeared in several places including the the Weekly Dig and the local arts website Big, Red and Shiny.
See the graffiti section of this site or my for-sale gallery site RobReact.com for more information.
I've also done some illustration, both black and white and color, for several local publications; most notably a cover for the Weekly Dig's graffiti issue.
Teaching/Speaking
- "JavaScript 101: Using JavaScript to Add Interactivity to Your Web Site" Boston JavaScript Meetup at Microsoft New England Research Division
- "The Future is Now: Theming Wordpress with HMTL5" WordCamp Boston. Microsoft New England Research Division
- "JavaScript Library Comparisons" Center for Digital Imaging Arts at Boston University
- "JavaScript Library Comparisons" Boston JavaScript Meetup at Microsoft New England Research Division
- Appeared on the panel MITX panel "Building Social Applications & Widgets for Top Platforms" with Matthew Adkisson, (CEO, FreeCause.com); Norris Boyd (Engineering Manager, Google); C.C. Chapman (Partner, The Advance Guard); and Ann Glenn (Senior Web Producer, Sony Pictures Imageworks Interactive.) Moderated by Chris Brogan.
- In 2009 I taught a class on graffiti/street art at the Rogers Middle School in Hyde Park with the Citizens Schools program
- I also taught a one class on graffiti at Northeastern University’s Stetson West dormitory
Writing
I wrote about cinema for several years for Boston's Weekly Dig (where I also served as Film Editor), Shovel Magazine and The Boston Metro. My movies section contains my (almost) complete film writing archive.
When I was younger I also co-wrote and co-produced a play called Black Cats and White Lies that played at the C. Walsh Theater at Suffolk University.
I recently wrote a cover article about collectible comics for Rare Book Review and an article about Social Networking for Association Meetings magazine.
Comics
I worked as an inker in the traditional collaborative process for several years. My credits in that regard include:
- Cadre #3 from Nifty Comics: inks on an 18 page story
- Across the Pond Presents #2 from Across the Pond Comics: inks on a 7 page story
- Shakti Warriors #3: inks on an 8 page story
- Shakti Warriors #2: inks on an 8 page story
- Futurius: Tales from the Plex inks on a 10 page story
- Commercial Suicide vol. 3 inks on 2 pages of a 6 page story
- Vamperotica #38 from Brainstorm Comics inks on two pinups
- Vamperotica Tales #1 from Brainstorm Comics inks on two pinups
- Vamperotica Tales #4 from Brainstorm Comics inks on a 12 page story
- Vamperotica #41 from Brainstorm Comics inks
Not art-related, but definitely comics related, I maintain a general comics blog at itsalljustcomics.com called "It's All Just Comics" that deals with everything from the world's most valuable collectible comics to the latest/greatest Comics/Manga/BD on the shelves.
Social Networks
I have a presence on (and actually use) the following social networks and services:
- Twitter / rob_react
- MySpace.com - Rob React
- rob_react's bookmarks on del.icio.us
- Flickr: Photos from Rob React
- rob_react's Music Profile – Users at Last.fm
- LinkedIn: Rob Larsen
- reddit.com
- vimeo
The Important Stuff
Beyond all that I live in Boston with my wife and our cat. She does UI Design and the cat mostly sleeps. We have fun together.
About DrunkenFist.com
Colophon
The current version (the third major revision) of the site was designed and developed by me in about a year and a half starting in 2008. The actual work involved probably took three months of that time.
Software used in the creation of this site:
- Microsoft Visio for wireframes
- Adobe Illustrator CS4 and Photoshop CS4 for the design
- Dreamweaver CS4 for prototyping and site management
- Fireworks CS4 for image production
My current work machine is a 16.0" Sony Vaio FW Intel Core 2 Duo (2.53GHz) with 8GB of RAM running Windows 7. As for the server, I've hosted for over eleven years at Futurequest, on a Linux machine running Apache, PHP and MySql. I host all of my media with Amazon S3 and Amazon CloudFront. My site source code is under Subversion hosted at Wush.net. I use Atlassian's Jira for bug-tracking. I use the Magpie RSS Parser and the Keith Devens PHP XML Library to do some XML magic around here. I also use the QuickCache caching system to serve cached/gzipped content. My blog is proudly running WordPress.
Any code samples I post are released under the MIT License
This site generated 1,541,116 page views in 2007, 2,400,320 page views in 2008 and 2,985,177 page views in 2009.