Today I spent the majority of my time processing some data we captured about a month ago.  The cheerleading team from UC Davis came in for a shoot and audio session for our College Hoops basketball game.  We recorded a fair number of takes, and the long, arduous process of getting the data ready for animation is quite a pain. 

I got the 3D model of the cheerleader from our modelers, and, while I guess I'm not surprised, I am a bit, well, surprised.  The 3D cheerleader model was wearing a tight halter top with short shorts and stiletto-heeled boots.  Um, have you ever seen any college cheerleaders wearing outfits like that?  Additionally, she was rather well-endowed, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but none of the cheerleaders who came that day looked remotely like our model.  Nerds have quite an imagination, yes?  I can just imagine the  modeler sitting there at his computer creating his "dream woman", and then a whole horde of nerds around him encouraging him to "make them bigger!"

So tomorrow J.J. Redick from Duke is coming for a "celebrity" mocap shoot.  I heard there's going to be a media circus, although since this is only a college-level celebrity (as opposed to Derek Jeter or Shaq) I don't honestly think that anyone's going to show up or care.  I asked the other folks in our department how the previous celebrity shoots went and they said that they were all circus-like.  In fact, when one of the reporters asked someone in our marketing department how our equipment worked he told the reporter, "Oh, the cameras shoot lasers and store terabytes of information!" 

Right.  Read the wikipedia entry again and you'll see that he's so wrong he could only be a marketing person.  While I will freely admit that our cameras shoot red light, they're definitely not lasers.  And the re-constructed 3D data is rarely over 5 megabytes, let alone a gigabyte. 

After work I went on my daily jog around the small park that's near my house.  They have public tennis courts there, and as usual, there were several attractive women there playing tennis.  Is there anything hotter than an athletic woman?  I'm going to have to take up tennis, but I'm going to need lots of practice; Maria Sharapova could beat me right now -  even after I tied her up and drugged her with a roofie.

So after my jog I showered and went to my new favorite Tuesday night event: trivia at The Bitter End.  The trivia is quite good, and the comraderie of our team makes it a very enjoyable weekday excursion.  The team with the best name wins a round of shots so there's lots of creativity.  I'll admit, however, I was pretty surprised at the team names.  It seems the cruder and more vulgar the team name, the more readily accepted it is, and this only surprised me because I thought San Francisco was a very uptight and politically correct town.  Teams that make fun of the trivia host's mom really go over well (the host's name is Tim - a really nice guy). 

For example, our name tonight was, "If your team name makes fun of Mel Gibson then you're a warmongering Jew."  (In our defense, the lone Jewish guy on our team came up with the name)  In fact, most teams took advantage of Gibson's recent plight. 

We finished in 3rd tonight, for the second week in a row, netting us another $10 in cash ($30 for first, $20 for second, $10 for third).  A bit disappointing, since we typically finish in first!  We've got a good team.  Think you got game?  Here are some of tonight's questions:

1. What are the 5 remaining Communist countries?

2. What two state capitals have the same number of syllables and rhyme? 

3. What is the chemical compound CH4?

4. Into what bodies of water do the following rivers empty?  a. Mississippi   b. Jordan   c. Volga

5. Which two teams played in the 2004 Super Bowl and what was the score?

No sharing of answers, and no looking them up on the Internet, either!