Mike Milo’s Journal

I woke up this morning after only 4 hours of sleep ( late-nite freelance…) to find our gazebo had blown down from the high winds.

Chatsworth is notorious for high gusts of wind. Sometimes they can get up to 60 mph. Once it blew our fence down and almost every year they blow all the big potted plants off our front deck.
Here’s a movie of the fire. It should open with Quicktime.
Around 3pm a fire sprang up about a 1/2 mile behind my house and it’s really nasty due to those same high gusts. I just heard on the news that an L.A. City Firefighter is in serious condition from fighting it!
Poor guy… I pray he is okay.

Strange lights in the sky over my house in Chatsworth! From what I understand it was a missle launched down in San Diego and we got to see it! It was truly amazing and I wish the pictures had come out better. Ah well… The cone that you see in the first picture was moving across the sky and leaving the trail you see. It disappeared in a few minutes. Still, it was really something!

Here’s an article from 1998 when our pilot Ignoramooses came out!

It was from my local papaer in New Jersey, The Bergen Record!

They actually ended up doing an article on Swaroop years later!

I was born the last year of The Baby Boomers and I guess I apply to all this because this is exactly how my childhood went. Ahhh kids, it ain’t like this anymore! And honestly you can thank the liberals for it.

Anyway, this is what it was like when I grew up.

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they
carried us.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.

Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored

lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when

we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE

actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soda pop with sugar

in it, but we weren’t overweight because

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were

back when the streetlights came on.

No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K. We didn’t have cell phones , or beepers or wireless PDAs

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down

the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, no video games at all,

no 1200 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell

phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat

rooms……….WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays,

made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t

had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.

They

actually sided with the law!

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers

and inventors ever!

The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned

HOW TO

DEAL WITH IT ALL!

This is a really cool site. A man named Michael Paulus took the time to sketch out the skeletal construction of 22 different cartoon characters. Why is it cool? I don’t really know but I like it!
Go check it out here!

I have gorillas on my walls…

It’s funny but I can still remember being a kid and friends paying me 25 cents to make pictures out of the oil spots on the roads. I guess that translated in part to me being an artist…

That said, every morning I wake up and look at my bedroom walls which are painted in a bawdy red color with a sponge texture on them which I love because it has so many interesting shapes on it.

If you look really close you can see the same shape of the bunny that I also drew on the paper…

One of the most frequent thing I see is gorilla shapes which is really funny to me.

The other morning I decided to sketch a few of those shapes and see what came out…

Two things Navy SEALS are always taught:

Keep your priorities in order
Know when to act without hesitation

A college professor, an avowed atheist and active in the ACLU, was
teaching his class. He shocked several of his students when he flatly
stated that once and for all he was going to prove there was no God.
Addressing the ceiling he shouted: “GOD, if you are real, then I want you
to knock me off this platform. I’ll give you exactly 15 minutes!!!!!”

The lecture room fell silent. You could hear a pin drop.

Ten minutes went by. ” I’m waiting God, if you’re real knock me off this
platform!!!!”

Again after 4 minutes, the professor taunted God saying, “Here I am,
God!!! I’m still waiting!!!”
His count down got down to the last couple of minutes when a SEAL, just
released from the Navy after serving in Afghanistan and Iraq and newly
registered in the class, walked up to the Professor.

The SEAL hit him full force in the face, and sent the Professor tumbling
from his lofty platform. The Professor was out cold!!

The students were stunned and shocked. They began to babble in confusion.

The SEAL nonchalantly took his seat in the front row and sat silent. The
class looked at him and fell silent…..waiting.

Eventually, the professor came to and was noticeably shaken.
He looked at the SEAL in the front row. When the professor regained his
senses and could speak he asked: “What the hell is the matter with you?
Why did you do that?

“God was really busy, protecting America’s soldiers, who are protecting
your right to say stupid things and act like an idiot!”

“So he sent me!”

Here’s something new! If you’ve ever stopped by here to read any of this you’ll know that I have had a personal battle with Maya for years. I first had trouble getting the basics, then I figured that out only to be stymied by trying to build a character, then I finally got that working right only to be thwarted by rigging the character and making a skeleton for it to move. Well, eventually I got even that working…
But then there were the “Paint Weights”

Ohhhh, the Paint Weights. How I have had issues with the Paint Weights.
If you don’t know the art of Painting Weights is the process of assigning influences either 0 or 1 to each point on a character’s body so it can know which bone is effecting it and how much it should move with that bone.

The Painting comes from a tool whereby you essentially “airbrush” values of black or white

and shades of grey over the geometry of the character. The Black represents no influence and the White represents total influence. The shades of grey are inbetween.

Yes, it’s tedious.

But necessary. If you don’t do it right you can see what happens in the image in the left. All the points go wacky when you try and move a part.

Kinda gives you a newfound respect for The Incredibles huh?

Yeah, me too.

Well I have been throught tutorial after tutorial trying to make it all work and getting basically squat for it.
Sure I could desgin and build a character in Maya now but if I can get the damn skelton to make the character move it’s pretty much all useless right?
then I had another issue where every time I moved the head his eyelids would cave in around themselves and When I moved his shoulders his side would cave in…

Sigh… the first was solved by tricking Maya using Set driven Keys…

Don’t worry I won’t go into that…
The second issue was our dear old friend Mr. Paint Weights.

Well, I got it all sorted out now…

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
Today I figured out how to use the little buggers!
Today I was able to pose my character out!
Now you may not think this is amazing… after all many people can do it. Whole studios churn out incredible product and make us all laugh and that’s great.
But today, I can do it too!
As you can see I am quite pleased. Forgive me if I sound like I am bragging. I am just happy that the four years I’ve spent learning have actually paid off a bit! :-)

Poltergoose in all his glory!