Cartoon Doctor - www.drmussey.com

Two months ago, October 2009, marks an interesting anniversary for animation: It’s been 20 years since animation software was available in any meaningful form for the PC platform. Around October 1989, Autodesk released an extremely well written and revolutionary MS-DOS art program that worked on even an Intel 286 chip: Autodesk Animator. Everybody hates it when old people start saying “I remember when,” but you cannot imagine the excitement I had when this software was first released. It literally made me buy my first computer: A Packard Bell 286 computer from a catalog-department store called Service Merchandise. The computer had a 40 megabyte hard-drive and 1 megabyte of RAM. You young people need to pause for a moment and consider what I just said: My dream computer had less than 1/8000th the amount of RAM present in your pocket mp3 player. It did NOT come with a mouse, monitor, modem, network card, sound card (they actually barely existed then until SoundBlaster shook up th...

This is a big day for Disney and Toon Boom.  Too many years have passed since Disney released an actual hand-drawn motion picture.  Today, the studio releases "The Princess and the Frog" to rave reviews. What's especially cool about this release is knowing the studio did the entire production on the same Toon Boom software I use to create my animations.  It looks like Disney has remained true to its long tradition of high quality drawn animation.  Let's hope it does well at the box office.

End of year lists: Top Health Stories of 2009 included the following: 1. Health Care Reform dominated the news with talk about "Death Panels" terrifying seniors who feared being bumped off early to make way for younger patients.  It was, of course, total nonsense.  The mere fact that anyone took it seriously is a sad commentary on the state of our nation. 2. In second place, H1N1 dominated the news.  Patients became frantic about getting vaccines for both the regular flu and H1N1.  The fact that children were at greatest risk for death from H1N1 did not deter older adults from pushing to the front of the line.  3. Breast cancer recommendations took a leap into the bizarre as women under 50 were advised against mammograms, defying all previous guidelines.  Since my practice partner had her cancer caught at age 48 by a mammogram (link to story), we took particular offense at these recommendations. 4. A story that got a lot of local attention was t...

Since Windows 7 arrived, Tablet PC users working in portrait mode have battled the curse of the duplicate and scrambled cursor.  It was confusing, headache inducing, and annoying.  It remained through multiple beta and final revisions of Windows 7.  Much to our horror, it remained in the final release. The appearance looked like: Now, the solution has been found! Go to Control Panel Find "Mouse Properties" Go to "Pointer Options" Put a check mark in the "Display Pointer trails" Slide the bar over to "short" Apply the changes and then restart journal. This problem seems to have been solved. I am a heavy Journal user and this has driven me CRAZY!!!

I’ve been listening to the non-stop computer press love affair with Windows 7. Upgrade your PC’s! Don’t be afraid! This time Microsoft has done it right! Well, not exactly… We have a lot of laptops in our office and home. We try to stick with major brands and configurations. A few built desktops are in our home, but mainly we have Tablet PC’s, which tend to stick to basic Intel Motherboard and Graphics configurations. Thus, you would think these would be easy to upgrade. Guess again! Again, these are major brands: Lenovo, HP, Toshiba, Fujitsu. These have all been best selling tablet pc’s. Microsoft should know these machines! Here are the issues: 1. Portrait mode on a tablet PC creates a double cursor. These machines were designed to be held and used like notebooks, using the tablet feature and Windows Journal or Office One Note. It’s usable, but you often get confused by the weird double cursor. This bug appears in every tablet we have and was present from even the Beta On...

This week, I attended the "More for Less" event in Washington, D.C., sponsored by Toon Boom , the makers of animation software. In the 1930's, Walt Disney was not content to only create an animation studio. He wanted to form an "animation community" to foster and enhance the art of animation. His efforts resulted in some of the finest animation of all time and, of course, ultimately led to the creation of the entertainment powerhouse we know so well today. Joan Vogelesang, CEO of Toon Boom is attempting to create and foster a similar community, using the miracle of worldwide interactive communication. Animation is experiencing global growth. Skilled animators are now in short supply as studios across the world are created and expand. Yet, technology has changed the model. Animators no longer must congregate in a central Burbank, California headquarters as in Disney's day. Today, an animation studio can be virtual and literally span the globe. The chal...

As if to emphasize the recent bad press regarding the unreliability of "the cloud," YouTube Video has managed to become unreliable in hosting some of my animations. Here's the H1N1 update animation posted on Dailymotion: H1N1 Update Report 01