Month: March 2007

Cartoon Career Cruising

andertoons2 Comments

So after having the photographer out yesterday from CareerCruising.com, I thought I’d dig into their site a bit and see if cartooning was indeed the right job for me.

I answered somewhere between 75 and 100 questions and (drum roll please) …

Career1

Yep! It works! Pretty well, really. I’d say it nailed me fairly quickly.

Here are the factors that apparently mattered the most:

Career2

After reading through the job description, earnings and working condition portions of the site, I’d say they have good realistic info on cartooning as a career as well.

Boy, this stuff’s come a long way from when I was in high school.

I remember filling in little dots and having them calculated some weeks later into a list of careers that might suit me. Tops on that list? Dancer and garbage man.

Andertoons 2.0 – Topic Pulldown

andertoons

OK, another small thing here, but I really like it.

The topic pulldown menu in the upper right of the header has changed slightly with topics being grouped under topic headings.

Here it is in Firefox:

Pulldown1

And in Safari:

Pulldown2

I love Firefox, and recently switched back to it to utilize a webmaster toolbar, but, man, you gotta love how stuff looks in Safari.

Anyway, like I said, a small thing, but I think it’ll help organize what was becoming a very long list. Enjoy!

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Take THIS Old High School Guidance Counselor!

andertoons5 Comments

Got this email recently:

Hi Mr. Anderson, i am a local photojournalist looking to take pictures of a Cartoonist doing his job for an educational career guide called Career Cruising. if possible, i’d welcome the opportunity to take photos of you at work for this great educational tool. please contact me at your convenience.

Neat, huh?

The photographer came over this afternoon and took a slew of pics of me inking, coloring, pretending to talk on the phone, and thinking of ideas. (Lemme tell you, that last one’s a stunner!)

She asked a lot of questions, and the experience, albeit a little embarrassing, was interesting. The photographer was very complimentary about my work, and really sweet around the kids.

I was told a few times, very earnestly, that I have the coolest job in the world. And I gotta say, it’d be difficult to disagree.

Anyway, at the end I took a pic of her taking a pic of me just for fun.

Img 2920

We traded looks at each other’s digital pics and said good day.

Word is my pics will be up on their site within a few months. I’ll letcha know…

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Andertoons 2.0 – URLs

andertoons

One of the best ideas my web team came up with is something called mod_rewrite:

This module uses a rule-based rewriting engine (based on a regular-expression parser) to rewrite requested URLs on the fly. It supports an unlimited number of rules and an unlimited number of attached rule conditions for each rule to provide a really flexible and powerful URL manipulation mechanism. The URL manipulations can depend on various tests, for instance server variables, environment variables, HTTP headers, time stamps and even external database lookups in various formats can be used to achieve a really granular URL matching.

Basically, it takes complicated URLs like http://blog.andertoons.com/search.php?kwords=sales&browseall=false&resultsfrom=1&cat=Sales (showing sales-themed cartoons) to something much simpler like http://blog.andertoons.com/cartoons/sales/.

Now instead of having to solely use the site itself for navigation, you can search and browse via your browser’s address bar.

Looking for the business cartoons page? Add /cartoons/business/ after http://blog.andertoons.com.

Wanna search for cartoons about meetings? Just add /search/meetings/ at the end.

Need cartoon #4002? Add /cartoon/4002/.

No more looooooong URLs. No more remembering to add .php at the end. No more confusion.

And the best part? All the old URLs people bookmarked or have linked to still work, and are automatically redirected to the current address.

Simple, easy, intuitive URLs. Nice!

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Ultimately

andertoons6 Comments

Lately I’ve been back into comic books.

It started about a year or so ago while looking for graphic novels at the library. I ran across The Ultimates which I liked very much. The art is wonderful (so much better than what I remember from being a kid) and the stories are, well, more adult.

Ultimates

Everyone is re-imagined (I hate that word, but it fits here) in interesting ways. Giant Man and Wasp have some serious domestic issues, Thor is a seemingly crazy eco-hippie, the Hulk is maleness magnified a hundred fold… Neat stuff.

It got me into the whole Ultimate imprint of Marvel comics. I usually wait for the hardcover collections to come out, and I follow Ultimate Spider-Man, Ultimate Fantastic Four and The Ultimates.

I also recently followed the whole Civil War thingy (disappointing though it was), and I’m buying the nine issue series, Ultimate Power. It’s hard to ignore when Sue Storm looks like this:

Suestorm



While the art and stories are generally more interesting and geared toward adults (OK, man-children), also interesting is how the ads have changed.

Gone are the X-ray specs and sea monkeys. Video games and movies remain, but there’s an awful lot of car ads. And a recent ad with a woman sensuously licking an ice cream cone for Old Spice (yes, Old Spice!) strikes me as very adult.

And it’s all cool. I like reading them, and it’s nice to see the medium matured. But it’s harder and harder to find a comic for my son that I feel comfortable with him reading.

He’s three and loves loves LOVES superheroes. Captain American especially.

I’ve tried the supposed all-ages comics, but there’s an awful lot of violence in them, and he has plenty of time to be desensitized to that by TV down the road.

With the kids-related toy lines, and the Marvel babies yet to come, you’d think there’d be friendlier stuff for a kid his age.

Anyway, it’s cool to be somewhat back into comics again. And I’m looking forward to sharing them more with my son down the road.

What a long way they’ve come.

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