I had lunch with Ian on Friday and as usual we had an interesting discussion.

The iPhone was a hot topic and not surprisingly we are both unimpressed.  One of the primary reasons is the lack of credit to Jeff Han for his Multi-Touch Interaction Research (Ian feels strongly about this because one of his students worked on a similar project).  In fact, there's a lot of credit not given to other people that Apple seems content to steal and use as their own.  While those that are in the graphics community tend to know or find out about who things are done and whom credit should be given to quite quickly; those in the general public do not.  By taking credit for what others have done, Apple becomes a false idol for praise and worship by the general public and over time the masses become brainwashed by the mass marketing marchine that is Apple Inc.  Ian brought up another iPhone feature that is credited to Apple but was created in the 60s.  The slow panning of images for the slideshow is not an Apple creation but one that is known as the Ken Burns Effect.  If you observe closely you'll also see the same sort of slideshow being used by the 360 (as a recent precedent).

Other topics of discussion included movies.  Ian and I talk a lot about movies because we watch a lot of them and are heavily involved in graphics as well as making sure the graphics are of good quality.  One particular subset of movie discussion was time editing of movies shown on TV.  In case you hadn't noticed but most movies have a "edited for time" warning (it really is a warning) before they're shown on TV.  While you may think they slice out a few seconds here and there that's entirely untrue.  For example, Ian and I both watched the same showing of "Love Actually" by coincidence in December (at different locations as he was on leave from work).  We noticed that the scene where The Prime Minister (Hugh Grant) rushes from Number 11 to find (Martine McCutcheon) was cut down to about 10 seconds.  In the full version The Prime Minister reaches the street that she lives on and there are several doors knocked on, a Christmas carol sung, and a pensioner talked to before he finally reaches the house next to Natalie's house.  In the cut down version they jump immediately from Number 11 to the house next to Natalie.  How about a more extreme example?  Kill Bill was shown (both volumes) on TBS last weekend and I was horrified by how much of the movie had been cut out.  Granted there was violence but some of the more emotional scenes were simply removed and many of the cinematically beautiful moments (plane flying in over the rooftops) were removed.  Outragged!

Continuing in our movie discussions Ian asked me about my movie collection and I mentioned that I had to cut down as I had no more room in my room.  You know you have too many movies when they no longer fit in an entire room.  I ordered boxes so I can store the movies away in another room until I move.  I think that one whole room will have to be dedicated entirely to my movies and collections of the odd things that I collect.  I think I have too much right now…too many boxes…too many computers…too many movies…too many toys…too many radio controller toys…too many games…of course after I move I'll have so much room that I won't have enough of each and will have to *cough* fill out the collections.

We then ended our lunch with a quick conversation heavy on programming and technical details that I cannot divulge here but needless to say, very interesting over all.  Wish you could've been there.