Mike Milo’s Journal

Anyone that knows me will tell you I am a tech junkie. I have always had the latest gadgets and toys. It’s just ‘how I roll’ so to speak. My biggest indulgence has always been the PDA. It is an invaluable tool for developing cartoons and ideas. I primarily use them to write with and jot down ideas for development etc. I am almost never without mine be3cause you never know when someone is going to say something funny I can use in a cartoon or a pitch to a studio. Most of my ideas come from life and I am too forgetful to remember it so I write it down. Now of course I could just carry around a pad of paper and in fact I know a few friends who do that but what if I lost it? Tons of great ideas down the toilet. Lose my PDA? I suppose that’s possible too and once someone stole my Psion 5 from the McDonalds outside of Warner Bros. Luckily you are supposed to sychronize them and like a good lil’ boy I did just that and all my files were safely on my computer.

I have had every Palm Pilot since the Palm IIIx which I sold for an upgrade to the awesome Palm V which was then replaced by the Palm IIIc which I really loved. the trouble with it was that you had to write in Palm’s Grafitti text, which while asy to master was difficult in getting anything of substance down on paper because you had to write each word out. Much slower than typing. Anyway when Windows CE devices came out with their little keyboards man I was in heaven. One problem. When you let the battery run down? All your data disappeared! AH well luckily I backed up eh?

Once cellphones started coming out of course I had to have one of those and was one of the first to get one. Lately they have begun to merge and so I tiptoed out on to the bleeding edge and got myself a Palm Treo 650 which has served me faithfully for the last 4 years or so. I loved it and have even tapped out whole chapters of a book I’ll never finish on it while waiting on line for things like tires and doctors. Yeah I loved my Treo but lately it has begun to wear out. It stopped sychronizing last week and as I’ve outlined before I am in serious need of that function so I decided it was time to get a new phone.

Enter the XV6800!

(Took me a long time to get to this spot huh?)

Anyway…

I just switched to Verizon from ATT because I was tired of the service. No, I don’t expect better service from Verizon I just figure it will be different and I won’t have the same old problems but instead will inherit new problems which will at least be different. The XV is pretty cool it has WiFi built in which is ncie because then when I’m home I don’t need to use Verizon’s data plan. I can surf the web free which is awesome. It even lets me log in to Gmail. Google converts all the web content (when it can) to a mobile format which is great too. The VX has Mobile Word and Excel built in as well which is nice so I can write in Word’s native .doc format. I have to say it’s a bit overly complicated though. There are like 9 buttons on the sides of the device. It also seems to be have been developed for a left handed person because everything is on the opposite side of where I’d want it. The stylus, scroll wheel and power button are all on the opposite side of what I am used to. The one thing that bugs me so far is that you have to turn the phone on each time. On my old Treo you hit a button; any button and the phone turned on and asked if you wanted to unlock the screen so you can use it. IF you did want to turn it on, you pressed one button and you were in. With the VX I have to push the side of the device top turn it on. There is no Locking the phone that I can see so far which is odd. I think I would have liked it better if the device was powered by the Phone button like every other device I’ve seen. I guess I’ll get used to it.

A recent pic taken of my daughter Melissa on the XV6800

The camera on it is nice too, it’s a 2 megapixel one and it even has a Flash although you’re still not going to want to take Wedding videos or that video of that sasquatch you saw as it’s not the best but it’s cool to be able to have a camera with you at all times. I even use the camera to record where I parked so I can find the spot later on. I also have used it to snap pics of the sink so I could get the right kind of parts I needed when I had to fix it. Pretty nifty.

All in all the VX6800 is a cool phone but unless your a techie geek like me, it’s probably overkill

I don’t know if there’s anyone else out there that needs something like this but after many years of trying different MPG converters WinFF kicks serious ass! First of all it’s free which is invaluable and second not only does it convert to H264 and and about twenty other formats including ones for your iPod, it also converts directly to .flv which is Flash’s video format. If you’ve ever checked out YouTube you have definitely used .flv before.

While I’m at it I found a very simple way to strip YouTube files out of the pages if anyone wants to know…

All you really need to do is install Download Helper to Firefox’s add ins and it will sit up in your menu bar. When there is a file that can be downloaded from a site it will swirl. From there you just download it and use FLV Player to play your files.

ASUS recently came out with Asus LS201 — a TFT monitor with a protective panel made of crystal-sapphire.  Check out this stress test a Ukrainian show did.  Amazing! The guy hits it straight on with a hammer and although you can sort of see that he pulls his punches it’s still awesome.  You can fire a crossbow at it and it still won’t break! Outstanding! I wonder when this will become standard in laptops etc?

Here’s a drawing of Kapoodle, a character my friend Harry and I came up with. A few years back I did a small animation with him (with a much older design) which you can see here.

Recently, I wrote a script for a Kapoodle cartoon. Below is an excerpt:

Interesting how traditions are started.

When four of Santa’s elves got sick, the trainee elves did not produce toys as fast as the regular ones, and Santa began to feel the Pre-Christmas pressure.

Then Mrs Claus told Santa her Mother was coming to visit, which stressed Santa even more.

When he went to harness the reindeer, he found that three of them were about to give birth and two others had jumped the fence and were out, Heaven knows where.

Then when he began to load the sleigh, one of the floorboards cracked, the toy bag fell to the ground
and all the toys were scattered.

Frustrated, Santa went in the house for a cup of apple cider and a shot of rum. When he went to the cupboard, he
discovered the elves had drunk all the cider and hidden the
liquor. In his frustration, he accidentally dropped
the cider jug, and it broke into hundreds of little
glass pieces all over the kitchen floor. He went to get the
broom and found the mice had eaten all the straw off the
end of the broom.

Just then the doorbell rang and irritated, Santa marched to the door, yanked it open, and there stood a little
angel with a great big Christmas tree.

The angel said cheerfully, “Merry Christmas, Santa.
Isn’t this a lovely day? I have a beautiful tree for you.
Where do you want me to stick it?”

And so began the tradition of the little angel stuck on top of the Christmas tree.

I purchased a Gateway laptop from Tiger Direct in April for my wife.  It was a Gateway MX3560 with an Intel Pentium M 735 1.7GHz processor. It was a refurbished unit and I thought it was a sweet lil’ laptop. I also thought that it would be okay to buy sometihng refurbished from Tiger Direct considering their track record in the past. Then it broke in October.
Now the laptop will not charge due to a problem with the cord not connecting to the motherboard. I contacted Gateway support and they told me the laptop is out of warranty. Apparently ‘out of warranty’ means that they can sell you something and then not service it or be resposnible for whether or not they did a good job of fixing it in the first place.

So what I bought from Tiger Direct is basically a door stop now.  I purchase from Tiger Direct frequently and they are were my prime source for computers but I am highly unsatisfied with my purchase. Sure it’s a refurbished computer but it didn’t even make it through a year of use. I know, it’s refurbished so you’re taking a gamble that it will work. Really? So that’s what it comes down to? I have to gamble (more…)

So today I installed the much dreaded often criticized Vista. It seemed to go pretty well and for the most part I have not even had that many problems except for one. I downloaded a driver for my realtek audio card and then tried to extract the zip file.

LOL! Look how long Vista told me it would take!

To be fair, I tried the downloading the same file later on with Firefox after installing it and that seemed to work better for whatever reason.
Weird!

A friend of mine just bought a Motion Computing Tablet PC just like mine and he was asking how I do my work with it and I thought it might be best to show him with a demo… soooo, I was playing around with Camtasia last night and recorded myself drawing and rendering an alligator. Granted it’s not the most ingenious design but it wasn’t intended to be. In order to show it I had to put break it up and put it on Youtube which will only take 100 mb and 10 minutes of time.

Anyway… check it out and let me know if you dig it!

Here’s the first part where I redline the drawing and clean it up.

Here’s the 2nd part where I color the character.

And finally here’s the last part where I render it out a bit.

Way back in 1998 while at Hanna Barbera, Harry and I created a show called the Iguana Boys which reloved around three Latino brothers who worked for an unusual artifact museum. The show eventually evolved into the Jackalope Boys for Cartoon Monsoon, because WB;(of all silly things) who bought it already had a lizard show. Anyway, we changed it to jackalopes. Fast forward to today adn Warner Bros Animation has all but closed it’s doors and the idea has reverted back to us. Soooooo, I decided to update them a bit. Here’s what I came up with!

And here’s the original designs. In the original idea Arriba was not the baby genius he  eventually became just before we pitched it to WB. I like that much better than what it previously was so I decided to keep it for the new designs. Now trust me I like the original designs but we didn’t sell it that way so I thought I’d try something fresh when I pitch it later this week. Of course I’ll bring both designs, and we’ll see what they think!