Mike Milo's Journal

So after all the rave reviews of simplicity installing the Crucial 256gb SSD drive, I decided it was idiot proof enough for me to install so I went and plunked down the change to buy one and waited excitedly for it to come in the mail…

It came in the mail and I got all excited about how I could put the Adobe suite on there, Maybe a li’ Maya action, some Z-Brush… Oh I was gonna ROCK this new spiffy hard drive! Yeah!

Well I installed the drive no problem booted it up and for the life of me could NOT get the Asus to recognize the drive.

I tried this:
How to initialize your SSD (Windows) – Crucial Community

and nothing happened…

For a bit I ran into not being able to boot to the bios either which of course scared me until I found this:
[B121] Force the Slate enter BIOS error: Reboot and Select proper Boot device

But my drive had been shut down correctly so again I basically had a very expensive eye patch which was pretty much useless except in case of Borg attack.

For a while i thought it might be that the ext DVD drive didn’t have enough power or something but the disk whirred and the drive seemed to be working.
I even tried to use a standard Windows 7 disk wondering if perhaps the disk itself was either faulty or that my Asus wasn’t recognizing it.

Nope, that was not it either,

Then in an amazing coincidence of frustration and irritation I happened to mash the little half moon button on the right side of the Asus and viola, it recognized the disk and began to install!

I was so excited! Parades were going off in my head, hot chicks throwing confetti, life was suddenly good again and I basked in my ingenuity!
Installing… installing… Yeah baby, Wait for it wait wait… ohhh yeah it’s done! Reboot reboot! So excited!

I’m gonna install all sorts of software rocking my new Crucial 256gb SSD drvie… and it’s gonna be gr-

Wait what’s this?
BOOTMGR is missing?
WTF?!?!?

No..no..no..no..nooooooooooooo!

And that’s my story.
So while it may have been easy for some of you, it’s NOT always a piece of cake.
Still trying to figure out how to get rid of the Bootmgr missing thing.
Wish me luck! :-/

UPDATE: 11/19/12

So I solved the problem by cloning the original hard drive. using a wonderful little free tool called Drive Image XML… It cloned the entire hard drive and although it still needed a fix via booting up with  my Windows 7 disk and running a repair routine,  I got it to finally work.

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.

Over the years I have had many instances where I have created vector art in Adobe Flash simply because I hate Illustrator’s interface. Unfortunately  if the art is for print media, eventually I will have to export the art out as either an .ai or an .eps file.

Herein typically lies the trouble.

The internet is littered with posts from people (even on the Adobe site itself) complaining of this well known problem.

The workflow is as follows:

• You draw something in Flash.
• You want to export that thing out to Illustrator as a vector file
• You go to Export>Image>Export as Ai> export as AI v6
• You scream and cry because when you open your exported file it’s been converted to CMYK colors instead of RGB!
• Nothing will convert it to RGB despite many attempts to change the Document Color mode or changing the Color Management. There are no color export settings for Flash.
• You hang your head and cry.

Ah, but there is a solution! It takes a few steps to do but it’s worth it!

The workflow is as follows:

• Draw the Mona Lisa in Flash
• export as an EPS
• What’s that you say? There is a pixel shift in your exported file creating horizontal white lines across your character or art?
• No worries, there’s a fix for that too!
• Select all of you art and then select the Live Paint bucket.
• Click on your art and Illustrator will convert the file to a Live Paint object.
• Now you will notice that your white lines have disappeared!
• rejoice that you have foundeth this here blog!

Shame on you Adobe… you can easily fix this and yet each version that comes out you ignore it. What happened to your great company? you’ve become as fat and bloated as Microsoft witht eh right hand not knowing (or caring) what the left hand is doing!

Shame! Shame! Shame!

Well after a long year of development SketchBook Pro 2010 has finally been announced and I am released from Non-Disclosure so I am allowed to talk about it! I was lucky enough to be included on the beta team and I have to say it’s an amazing update! There’s quite a few great updates to this iteration and I’m sure you’ll agree it’s with the upgrade!

Pencils, paper, markers, white-out, sharpeners, erasers, rulers, ellipses, I’m not kidding when I say you’d need a backpack to carry all the stuff that comes with Sketchbook Pro 2010 in one elegant and easy-to-use package. And yet, it’s simple layout will have you up and running in less than 10 minutes. I dare you not to fall in love with it’s streamlined interface!

For me the best part of SBP is that it has a pencil that feels and looks like a real pencil, something that no other graphics program is capable of doing out of the box and even then SBP does it better. I’ve seen even grouchy old school artists smile when they begin to draw with it, it’s that good.

But there’s more than meets the eye with this simple tool because with SBP’s new Custom brushes, the simple lowly pencil becomes a 900 lb. gorilla which can create tools that look like feathers, or skin or hair which you can then sketch with! The Custom Brush’s easy-to-use interface makes it simple to capture either specific pen strokes or areas from a texture that you can then paint with. Let me see you do that with a #2 pencil! You can also load and save out the new custom brushes as well as trade them with others which is a great addition to SBP’s already sweet lil’ arsenal. Plus in this new addition, there’s a long awaited Ellipse tool and a Ruler tool as well!

All in all, you’d be crazy not to use Sketchbook Pro for the simple reason that it makes your job as an artist/designer/draftsman easier and who doesn’t want that these days in this hectic world?

Pretty damn cool if you ask me!

Here’s a quick video of it too.

Now you may say to yourself, so what? What’s so cool about that?

Well the thing is that Motion only officially supports 1.5 gb of memory on the LE 1600 and yet as you can see by my screen cap I have 2 gb! Pretty cool!

How did I do it you say? It’s Photoshop you say?

Nah… actually I didn’t do anything. The Motion LE1600 comes with 512 mb of memory soldered onto the board and there’s only one slot for additional memory. For some reason if you put a 2 gb card into the slot it disables the 512mb on the board and accepting the 2gb stick you just installed! It’s a shame it disables the soldered 512mb I know but at least I have an extra 512mb than I used to have!

Sweet!

I’ve been told by the fellas at Autodesk that they are in need of more Beta testers for the new version of Sketchbook Pro due out early next year. If you’re interested, sign up by shooting a mail to Chris Cheung below…

In a few months, we’ll need help from artists-at-large for the testing of future SketchBook Pro features.  I want to start recruiting new candidates now.  If you are interested and think you would be able to spend the time to check out beta cuts and provide valuable feedback, I’m interested in hearing from you.

Mail chris.cheung@autodesk.com
To download the latest version or trial of SBP: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=11895121 (more…)

Haha!

Photoshop was the first program I used on a computer. I loved it. It worked so well.

Times change.

Adobe has turned into a retarded behomoth with no common sense at all.

There are many, many, many reasons why I hate Adobe… Flash is buggy and more bloated than ever. They made an update which really gives you nothing much except some crappy filters that look like a dog threw up on the screen….Acrobat STILL takes ridiculously long to open… Premiere is a joke compared to Final Cut Pro… Dreamweaver was better before Adobe messed with it… ( and it wasn’t that great then either)… Illustrator? Eh. Integration? Suuuuure. try opening an Illustrator file in Flash. HAH! Did I mention that Acrobat STILL takes ridiculously long to open???????

How about this one? (more…)

My daughter recently graduated from 5th grade and will be moving into Middle School. Here in CA. that’s a big deal and they have a graduation for it and everything.

As a present we gave my daughter an iPod Nano which as most know will play video. She loves it and of course now wants to watch everything on it. That said, she of course came to her dad wanted to digitize video to do it.

But how to do it? (more…)