About

Rob Larsen

What I'm listening to:

rob_react's Profile Page

I'll try to keep the editorializing to a minimum.

Wish me luck.

Here's a handy list of info

Day Job

Currently, I work as a Principal Presentation Engineer at Cramer. I manage a small team of front end developers. We build web sites. Prior to that I worked as a consultant for companies like Gillette, State Street, The Museum of Science, Boston and Webex Communications. Check out my web portfolio for the supergeek 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, 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:

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. image, drunkenfist.com rob larsen in paris

Comics

Against my better judgment, I've been involved with comics over the past several years (with a break in the middle.) My plan going forward is to just work on my own thing, hosted here and printed when I get to a good point in terms of content volume. Prior to that (recent) decision, I worked as an inker in the traditional collaborative process. My credits in that regard include:

image, drunkenfist.com rob larsen skateboarding
  • 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 comics.drunkenfist.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.

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. 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.

Social Networks

I have a presence on (and actually use) the following social networks and services:

The Important Stuff

Beyond all that I live in Boston with my girlfriend and our cat. She does UI Design for a financial services startup and the cat mostly sleeps. We have fun together.

About the Site

Links to Site

Here's a handy list of things that people might or might not be interested in about the site

The current version of the site was designed and developed by me in slightly over a year starting in 2005. The actual work involved probably took two months of that time with the bulk of that work happening over the summer of 2006.

Software used in the creation of this site:

  • Microsoft Visio for wireframes
  • Adobe Illustrator CS2 and Photoshop CS2 for the design
  • Dreamweaver 8 for prototyping and site management
  • Fireworks 8 for image production
  • Homesite 5.5 and Emacs for HTML, CSS and JavaScript coding

My current work machine is a 17.0" HP dv9000t Intel Core 2 Duo (2.0GHz) with 2GB of RAM running Vista. The site was built on a Dell Inspiron 5150 with a 3.06 GHz Mobile Pentium 4, 1.25 GB of RAM running Microsoft Windows XP Professional Service Pack 2 on one partition and Ubuntu install on another. As for the server, I've hosted for over seven years at Futurequest, on a Linux machine running Apache, PHP and MySql. I host all of my media with Amazon S3. My site source code is under Subversion hosted at Wush.net. 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 cahced/ 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 and has generated 576,447 page views in 2008 through the end of April.

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