First I must start this story by saying that most of the people staying in the Sig Nu house over the summer are not actually brothers, and that the chapter here rents rooms to various people over the summer so that they can pay their bills. With that, there are two girls living in the house over the summer and that is where our story begins.
About a week ago Alysia, one of those girls, decided that she wanted to put together a slip'n'slide and have a little lawn party one of these days. Well we decided that this past Wednesday would be that day. On Tuesday we went to Waterside (the shopping area I went to in order to get sheets), and stopped by Target, Lowes, and Giant Eagle (supermarket) to acquire all of the required accouterments; such as a large sheet of plastic to slide on, a metric crap ton of soil (which conveniently came out to exactly fifteen 20lbs bags) to build a pool at the end of the slide, a sprinkler, lots of burgers and hot dogs, etc. So when we got back, we felt fairly prepared for the upcoming event.
When Wednesday came around I went in to work early so that I could get off a little early and join in with the festivities. When I got back to the house at about 4:30, Alysia along with the other girl staying in the house, Ashley, and her friend Jeff had already set up the slide on a very large slope in the lawn and were just getting ready to turn on the water. I ran upstairs, threw on a swim-suite, and came back down just in time for the fun to begin. After we turned on the water and put down the baby shampoo (to reduce friction!) we started taking turn sliding down. Within about five minutes two things became very obvious: first, this is awesome; second, the gravel on the ground at the end of the slide is deadly. We quickly ran through our options on dealing with the gravel, talking about everything from putting down a comforter and pillows to shield from the gravel all the way to moving the slide. Finally we decided that we should move the slide and that it was time to start cooking.
We rolled the propane BBQ from out back to the front porch only to find out that there was no more gas. Luckily there is also a charcoal BBQ on the front porch, but we needed coal. That meant is was time for a field trip. We walked to Jeff's car, drove to the nearest Giant Eagle, did some shopping, and got our charcoal. Shortly after getting back, burgers were on the grill and the slide was moved to a flat area of the lawn. While it lost a little bit of its awesomeness, the slide still amounted to the most fun I've had since attending a giant, public, pillow fight. From there the evening continued and eventually concluded with much eating, drinking, and general merrymaking.
--
As a side note, I have had a few people ask me about work, so I thought I would fill everyone in with how that is going. What I am actually going to be doing with my research project will likely come to full fruition some time next week, but I am going to be comparing 3D animations of mouth only smiles and Duchenne smiles (smiles that also cause muscles around your eyes to flex), comparing how sincere or genuine people think each of the variations are. Duchenne smiles in actual people are supposed to show that the person is actually conveying a happy emotion that they are feeling, rather than smiling completely voluntarily.
So what I have actually been doing:
Reading a lot of literature on studies dealing with animation and smiles, actual Duchenne smiles, and some analysis techniques that I may take advantage of.
Animating smiles on 3D heads
Programming a front-end for a system to do Active Appearance Models, which I am going to use for my analysis
Helping out with someone else's project, story boarding for an interactive 3D game for children
Helping out with some maintenance on CMU's Motion Capture database, a very large database of free motion capture data
So until next time, I hope everyone is having a wonderful summer!
No comments:
Post a Comment