Mike Milo’s Journal

I’m working on a series of coloring books for a client surrounding a horse named Bony. This is the first page. Layout and story was done by my friend Harry and I am doing the pencils and cleanup as well as vectorization. The drawing was roughed out in Sketchbook Pro on my Tablet PC and the cleanup was done on my new scratchy Cintiq (which I am going to exchange on Friday) and then vectorized in Corel Draw X3

Now that I am traveling to work daily I find myself spending $60 a week on gas. That’s $240 a month!

For those of you who have to deal with the same issue, I got this from a friend… maybe it’ll help someone save on gas.

TIPS ON PUMPING GAS

I don’t know what you guys are paying for gasoline…. but here in California we are also paying higher, up to $3.50 per gallon. But my line of work is in petroleum for about 31 years now, so here are some tricks to get more of your money’s worth for every gallon..

Here at the Kinder Morgan Pipeline where I work in San Jose , CA we deliver about 4 million gallons in a 24-hour period thru the pipeline. One day is diesel the next day is jet fuel, and gasoline, regular and premium grades. We have 34-storage tanks here with a total capacity of 16,800,000 gallons.

Only buy or fill up your car or truck in the early morning when the ground temperature is still cold. Remember that all service stations have their storage tanks buried below ground. The colder the ground the more dense the gasoline, when it gets warmer gasoline expands, so buying in the
afternoon or in the evening….your gallon is not exactly a gallon. In the petroleum business, the specific gravity and the temperature of the gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, ethanol and other petroleum products plays an important role.

A 1-degree rise in temperature is a big deal for this business. But the service stations do not have temperature compensation at the pumps.

When you’re filling up do not squeeze the trigger of the nozzle to a fast mode. If you look you will see that the trigger has three (3)stages: low, middle, and high. In slow mode you should be pumping on low speed, thereby minimizing the vapors that are created while you are pumping. All hoses at the pump have a vapor return. If you are pumping on the fast rate, some other liquid that goes to your tank becomes vapor. Those vapors are being sucked up and back into the underground storage tank so you’re getting less worth for your money.

One of the most important tips is to fill up when your gas tank is HALF FULL or HALF EMPTY. The reason for this is, the more gas you have in your tank the less air occupying its empty space. Gasoline evaporates faster than you can imagine. Gasoline storage tanks have an internal floating roof. This roof serves as zero clearance between the gas and the atmosphere, so it minimizes the evaporation. Unlike service stations, here where I work, every truck that we load is temperature compensated so that every gallon is actually the exact amount.

Another reminder, if there is a gasoline truck pumping into the storage tanks when you stop to buy gas, DO NOT fill up–most likely the gasoline is being stirred up as the gas is being delivered, and you might pick up some f the dirt that normally settles on the bottom. Hope this will help you get the most value for your money.

DO SHARE THESE TIPS WITH OTHERS!

WHERE TO BUY USA GAS, THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT TO KNOW. READ ON

Gas rationing in the 80’s worked even though we grumbled about it. It might even be good for us! The Saudis are boycotting American goods. We should return the favor.

An interesting thought is to boycott their GAS.

Every time you fill up the car, you can avoid putting more money into the coffers of Saudi Arabia. Just buy from gas companies that don’t import their oil from the Saudis.

Nothing is more frustrating than the feeling that every time I fill-up the tank, I am sending my money to people who are trying to kill me, my family, and my friends.

I thought it might be interesting for you to know which oil companies are the best to buy gas from
and which major companies import Middle Eastern oil.

These companies import Middle Eastern oil:

Shell……………………… 205,742,000 barrels

Chevron/Texaco……… 144,332,000 barrels

Exxon /Mobil…………… 130,082,000 barrels

Marathon/Speedway… 117,740,000 barrels

Amoco……………………….62,231,000 barrels

Citgo gas is from South America, from a Dictator who hates Americans. If you do the math at $30/barrel, these imports amount to over $18 BILLION! (oil is now $90 – $100 a barrel

Here are some large companies that do not import Middle Eastern oil:

Sunoco………………0 barrels

Conoco………………0 barrels

Sinclair……………..0 barrels

B P/Phillips…………0 barrels

Hess…………………..0 barrels

ARC0………………..0 barrels

If you go to Sunoco.com, you will get a list of the station locations near you.

All of this information is available from the Department of Energy and each is required to state where they get their oil and how much they are importing.

Here in L.A. at CN and Nick as well as other studios around the city, the Wacom Citiq is the new ‘toy’ to have. A lot of storyboard artists are going digital,and after a season doing freelance digital storyboards on Twisted Whiskers I can see why. It makes the process so much easier. I have been doing my boards on my tablet PC but sometimes the file gets too large for my lil’ graphics processor to handle. In those cases the file really bogs down and takes a while to load, save rotate etc. Animating in flash in near impossible I assume because of the processor. Same thing for Photoshop. Very difficult to use.

So I decided to buy a Wacom Cintiq. (more…)

I found a fascinating article today about the creation of Photoshop which brought be down memory lane a bit . It is interesting to note that it was created on a Mac II and remained a Mac platform app for some time. I started using Photoshop when it was at v.3 way back at Hanna-Barbera with my friend Harry around 1994 or so.

We were both blown a way with what it could do and were instantly hooked. Invented by Thomas and John Knoll (who worked on Star Wars BTW) it revolutionized the digital, photo, efx and the art world. Pretty impressive fellas!

I can remember buying my first Mac; a Performa 6214. I also had AOL way back at v.1! Many moons for sure. I couldn’t afford a scanner so I figured out a way to fax art to the computer through the modem ( which was all Black and white) and then import it into Photoshop for coloring.  Actually, I’m not sure if either Harry or my brother gave me that idea but either way, I did it and it worked pretty well.

I remember being fascinated that I could create artwork and not have to color it with markers, which always either bled or gave you that streaker-mark line. Well, some people are fantastic at using markers like Bruce Timm for example but me? I’m an idiot I can’t do that sort of stuff.

Anyway, buying that computer was a real eye-opener for me and I have to thank my ‘little’ brother for telling what to get. I’m sure once he did though he was instantly sorry because there were times when I would call him frustrated that the damn thing wasn’t doing what I wanted. One particularly bad time I called and left an expletive filled message on his answering machine. He didn’t like that too much and chewed me out. I never did it again. It turned out that the Performa was actually  messed up and Apple replaced it for me.

I still blame him for all things that technically go wrong.

I’ve since moved on from the Mac to PCs mostly because I think using a Mac running OS X is akin to playing with a Fisher Price toy but also more importantly because there are less choices for 3D on it and also because I primarily use a Tablet PC of which again there is one Mac choice. Oh yeah and they’re BUTTLOAD hella expensive and unfoundedly so.

Case in point, I recently finished up doing some Flash animation at a new studio who because they didn’t know any better bought brand new dual core G5s Macs for their production. Mine crashed an average of 5 times a day without warning. That sucks for a company who prides themselves on supposedly superior hardware. Just  ’cause it’s shiny and aluminum doesn’t make it better inside Steve Jobs!

Anyway, back to Photoshop. Now I’m up to v.10 and while it’s still a great application, I seldom use it, having moved on to other more art specific apps. Yes it’s a great tool but there are many things I do not like about it. Especially since Adobe bought Macromedia and tried to combine all it’s apps into one big poop shute of a suite. Yech!

Flash doesn’t work as well for me, Photoshop doesn’t work as well, Dreamweaver doesn’t work as well and if you combine that with Vista then you get one big long trail of sticky poo.

And remember that bit above about my doing Flash animation on a Mac? Yeesh! Don’t try to animate on a Mac in Flash… it sucks BIG TIME! Of course some Mac head ( of which I was a die hard member once) will tell me it rocks but I would say to them that they should try running  Flash on a PC and they will instantly see that what they thought was great on a Mac now sucks because it’s slow and unresponsive. Probably in part because of the new CS3 suite but I can’t help but pine away for the old days of OS 9. Those were the days!

Currently I am writing this on our family computer and it’s a Mac Mini which I bought to do some DVD Authoring a few years back and abandoned after the project was over.  Funny enough I boot it up into running a PC just because I can’t stand the Mac any more. Best thing Steve-O ever did for the Mac in my opinion; made it run Windows!

Monday, I start at Cartoon Network on the 2nd season of a show called Chowder. I am really excited to work there as it’s a great atmosphere for creativity and also I will be working with some old friends of mine. That’s about all I’m gonna say  about it as studios generally don’t like it when you talk about them on your blog.

Anyway, watch Chowder!

Last night I went a little crazy and tried to install Vista Ultimate on my LE1600 Tablet PC. I say it’s crazy because although Vista is supposed to work on it, the Ultimate version is not because of Aero.
Well so far so good, in fact I am writing this post on my Vista enabled tablet PC right now!

Will it work forever? I have no idea but it works today!

A few more details below…

Turning off all the bells and whistles in Aero doesn’t seem to make the Tablet faster. I’m not sure if Vista automatically configures itself to work on the Tablet or if it just installs Ultimate and then lets you see what works and what doesn’t but in the settings I have all the eye candy set to on and my lil’ LE 1600 is chugging away jes’ fine. (more…)