Archives for the month of: July, 2004

Ever wanted to know where the Hanna-Barbera stu­dios are located? How about the Klasky-Csupo Com­plex, also known as the stu­dio behind the car­toon series Duckman?

Many of these stu­dios in Los Ange­les County are tucked away in areas that might not be acces­si­ble to the gen­eral pub­lic. In fact, only a hand­ful offer stu­dio tours and for most you’ll need a pri­vate invi­ta­tion to enter. For instance, Walt Dis­ney Stu­dios located in Bur­bank Cal­i­for­nia does not offer tours of the com­plex due in part to the level of access that is required because of the pro­duc­tion that incurs on the grounds.

The lot con­sists of sev­eral tele­vi­sion stu­dios (one of which was used exclu­sively for Home Improve­ment), a sound stu­dio for foley effects and sound­tracks for live-action and ani­mated pro­duc­tions. The com­plex also includes a school of art, employee restau­rant, office build­ings (includ­ing Roy Dis­ney) and the infa­mous ani­ma­tion build­ings which served as pro­duc­tion areas for Beauty and the Beast, Sleep­ing Beauty and a vari­ety of other Dis­ney movies.

For those of us who are not for­tu­nate enough to receive a pri­vate invi­ta­tion to these stu­dios there exists a behind-the-scenes web­site (cour­tesy of the Ani­ma­tion World Net­work) which includes infor­ma­tion on these landmarks.

Jump for JoyWhat if you were able to travel back in time and visit your younger (and more vibrant) self? I’ve often thought about this and won­dered if my younger self, at 6 or 7 years of age, would think the older or future ver­sion of myself turned out okay. I know grow­ing up I was very trust­ing of strangers, maybe too much now that I think about it, but not to the extent where I’d jump in their car at the flash of candy.

Grow­ing up I was mostly a home­body, but on occas­sion would travel around the neigh­bor­hood with my pack of friends. Okay, let’s be hon­est, my group of two or three friends. What would hap­pen if on one of these ram­buc­tious, youth wan­der­ing days I’d come across a man in his mid-20s, blonde hair, 6 feet 2 inches. Upon first impres­sion I’d notice the man was clean shaven and looked pleas­ant enough, unlike those strangers you see in ele­men­tary school videos; droopy eyes, beer gut and blood drip­ping from their sharp­ened teeth.

Then I won­der how, if it were pos­si­ble to time travel, would my future self find my younger self? In the movies, this is a rel­a­tively sim­ple process because it seems the main char­ac­ter always remem­bers where he or she was in their past lives. In real­ity, I would think this would be dif­fi­cult espe­cially if you had no rec­ol­lec­tion of your time­line, that is where you where at this such and such time. The only way I can think of to approach your younger self is to lit­er­ally stalk your past fam­ily. Nat­u­rally, you’d most likely remem­ber where you lived so it would just be a mat­ter of camp­ing out in front of your past house and then wait­ing, lurk­ing, look­ing creepy as ever.

After I real­ize that the only way I’d be able to approach my younger self would be by stalk­ing my fam­ily in the past, I tend to let that thought dis­s­ap­ate. My thought, some­what mixed up in this long expla­na­tion, is would my younger self approve of the future ver­sion of myself?

GravatarI’ve recently imple­mented Gra­vatar (Glob­ally Rec­og­nized Avatar) into kar​tooner​.com. Basi­cally, it’s an avatar ser­vice for web blogs, forums and community-orientated scripts like PHP­Nuke or Mambo. The con­cept is that the Gra­vatar server, which stores the 80×80 pixel images, rec­og­nizes and matches the email address you use when you com­ment on a blog and inserts your avatar image next to your comment.

The result is a more per­son­al­ized com­ment with your cus­tom avatar, be it a ram­buc­tious pirate or a dazed and con­fused senior cit­i­zen. Imple­ment­ing the Gra­vatar code into your respec­tive blog­ging CMS is a piece of cake. The cre­ator, Tom Werner of Mojombo​.com, has pro­vided a vari­ety of imple­men­ta­tion meth­ods for pop­u­lar blog­ging appli­ca­tions like Word­press, Textpat­tern and Mov­able­type — it’s just a mat­ter of down­load­ing and installing the plug-in and tweak­ing your templates.

So what are you wait­ing for? Go reg­is­ter a free account, and watch your avatar mag­i­cally appear next to your com­ments. You watch, you’ll want to com­ment just to see your Gravatar.

In response to Matt’s Word­press Color Scheme con­test, I’ve cre­ated a theme I dub “Pumpkin” — a vari­a­tion of kartooner.com’s color scheme — and sub­mit­ted it as an entry in the con­test. One of the stip­u­la­tions of the con­test is that you can­not mod­ify the lay­out, but you can go hog wild with the colors.

With a bit of tweak­ing, I man­aged to apply the style sheet to my own Word­press back­end, includ­ing a few inter­face changes, more­over things that I’ve been both­ered by since day one. We all have our pref­er­ences, and while Wordpress’s color scheme out the box is suit­able for the new user, a power designer like myself yearned for the day when I’d have the time to make a few changes.

While I’m quite fond of the font Geor­gia, I’ve always wanted to change the admin menu font to Arial or Ver­dana and decrease the font size. Partly because I’d rather keep as many of the items on the menu (Links, Cat­e­gories, Upload) on one line. As more menu links are added, they are wrapped to the next line depend­ing on the amount of space. Decreas­ing the font size keeps as many links on the menu bar as possible.

Also, in my expe­ri­ence Arial and Ver­dana just look bet­ter in menu inter­faces. Despite this minor tweak I decided to keep Geor­gia around as the main font for the rest of the back­end inter­face. It’s easy on the eyes and reminds me of the typo­graphic qual­ity of a novel.

Here’s a screen­shot of how the back­end looks for kar​tooner​.com, includ­ing a smaller ver­sion of the Word­press logo (note the sec­ond menu, wherein I’ve incor­po­rated tabs):

Wordpress Backend Color Scheme

For those who are inter­ested, or for those who cur­rently don’t use Word­press, here’s a page with screen­shots of the orig­i­nal, straight out of the box interface.

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