Mike Milo's Journal

Boy this iPhone thing just gets bigger and bigger! Now there’s even an app to let me blog from my phone. I use a sevice called WordPress which allows me to host the blogs contents on my own server (well, technically its my brother’s server) which is easier in the long run.
Now if they could just allow the damn thing to rotate sideways so my sausage fingers can type decently I’d be in business! It’s supposed to work but I can’t as of yet get it to rotate. It’s pretty neat though and as you can see, you can even add photos.

I don’t know if any of you use Firefox (in fact, I’m not really sure if anyone even reads this blog anymore) but I have found it to be an amazing product. One, because it’s free which is great, but two, it has extensions which you can add to the browser. It’s a great tool. What can you do with extensions for your browser? Tons of stuff!

For isntance, you can add an extension to make pictures larger on a page by pressing a button, you can add access to an FTP server from within the browser, you can access your Gmail account and have a little icon on the top right tell you if you have new email there. You can add links to your blog, or even use your Gmail’s 2 gig storage space for storing files instead of jsut email. How useful is THAT!?!?!
Yes, Firefox is pretty cool… One other addtion to Firefox which i am absolutely hooked on is tabbed internet browsing which is a must in my opinion. Let’s say you are looking on someone’s blog and you see a bunch of links you like while reading it. With Firefox, you can right-click and select Open in new Tab and the new page will loadin the background ready for you to see it when you want. If you add up a number o fthesae during your surfing experience, you can right click on one of the tabs and select save to bookmark and all the opeed tabs will be added to your bookmark list. the whole Extension experience has brought new life to the web in my opinion.
MY favorite extension of late is Foxmarks which allows you to put your bookmarks up on a server and then syncronize them with all your computers. For a tech geek like me who has 5 computers, it’s pretty cool to be able to just install that little widget and sync my bookmarks anywhere I go.

Mayerson on Animation: Lonesome Ghosts

There has been of late a trend on the animation blogs to break down the different cartoons from the 30′s- 50′s. One of the best is called Animation ID and it’s a great place to learn what animators animated which scenes. They also post the actual cartoons via YuoTube so it’s a pretty cool experience. Another blog which I like is Mark Mayerson’s blog called Mayerson on Animation which is all about animation history and Mark has broken down my favorite Mickey cartoon The Lonesome Ghosts. This cartoon is the reason I became an animator!

When I was a boy we had these cool Fisher Price projectors that had little cartridges with films on them that you would put in the side of the device. You could then watch it at full speed or frame by frame depending on how fast you turned the crank.
It was awesome! I watched this Lonesome Ghosts cartoon hundreds and hundereds of times. We also had these little projectors at the school’s library and you could rent these tiny 8mm cartidges of clips from Fantasia like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and The Dinosaur sequence and also the Lonesome Ghosts and a few other Mickey cartoons. I loved sitting there watching them over and over again. This may sound crazy to you but you have to remember that this was a time before, VCRs, DVDS, On Demand TV and Pay Per View so being in control was a real treat! Anyway, check out how this film breaks down animation-wise! Very cool!

Just thought I’d mention a cool plug-in for Firefox called Performancing. With it you can right-click anywhere on a web page and select Performancing and when you let go a double paned window comes up in your browser allowing you to blog about the page with it sitting right there in front of you. No more forgetting what exactly that guy said on his website that so inspired you to post about it. Now you can see it all at the same time. Neat lil’ plug-in if you ask me!

Anyone who reads this blog will notcie that is’s a tad different. The Redirect kinda gives it away. We decided to switch from Blogger to WordPress because Blogger seems to be doing some weird things lately, namely, waiting for 24 hours to post a picture. not allowing comments even though comments is set as “On” and other quirky things like not letting me log oin to my own account. I for one, got tired of it and decided to switch to WordPress which is in many ways cooler because it allows you to completely customize everything which is awesome. Of course I didn’t do it, my brother did it all. Hopefully it won’t cause me much grief. We’ll see.

It may be an old film but if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s a great review by my brother which sums up the movie pretty well. Man, I do believe he missed his calling!

Now you can subscribe to this blog easily if you’d like. Then instead of checking back to find I’ve been a lzy fool and not added anything new or interesting, you can find out very quickly whther it’s been updated, ( along wiht finding out about your other favorite sites as well) and you’ll know when a new post appears!
Click this image
(which is also on the toolbar to the right of your screen) and it will take you to Bloglines, a service that collects all of the blogs that you like to read daily. I have quite a few because artists seem to like to show and share what they do. Anyway, once you are there you can sign up for a free account and once you do, eahc time you check the site it will list all of the blogs you have subscribed to and tell you whether they’ve been updated or not!
You can read a more in depth article about this on my brother’s blog as well if you’re interested!

Lots of cool stuff to see at the Poltergoose Plog (Production Log). Above is one of the minor characters from the film, a werwolf heckler from the audience.
The PrePoroduction for the film is coming along nicely and we are currently building all the models and rigs for the short we are making. My freind Jaosn has kindly consented to rig eveything as well as help model stuff too. Go on and check it out! Visit often!

My brother just wrote a really interesting and in-depth article about music piracy. Check it out!
What the RIAA should do next…

There is a cool little site that promotes Blogging called BlogIntro.com.

You post your blog there and they “introduce” you to the community. I like it!
Kinda nice, like a friend at a cocktail party where you don’t know anyone introducing you.
Cool!