Progress Report 6: One week left
First off, my apologies to any reader who hoped for a weekend entry. Our home Internet is temporarily out while we wait for a new modem. So I will be posting this tomorrow, that is April 10th Monday morning.
Elsie's Birthday is today! One year old already. Wow, has that passed fast! What a cute little toddler is coming to replace our infant of yesteryear! I ought to figure out how to post photos to this sight. She is a real cutie.
This was a neat week. I was in a meeting for most of the day on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. It seemed pretty much like an ordinary meeting. But when I stepped back and looked at what I was actually doing I couldn't help but be amazed. I was in a meeting between 12 world class scientists (they were the world class scientists and I was a welcomed observer), including a Nobel Prize physicist. And they were all sitting around brainstorming on the creation of a working, scalable quantum computer using neutral atoms and lasers. I pretty much just observed and learned. The next day I was in our yard shoveling manure. Br. Roberts from our ward (Vice President of the New Mexico Appaloosa Club or something like that and a former Navy Seal) and his brother-in-law dumped a truck load of manure onto a tarp in our front yard. I took a couple dozens of wheelbarrows full into our back yard.
The thing is that whether I was watching plans be drawn for a quantum computer or shoveling manure, when I didn't have to be thinking of the work at hand I was thinking of how to get up a skeleton program by the 15th of April. On Wednesday I found a computationally cheap (I hope) way to convert the array of little endian bytes into shorts. On Thursday I found a nice pitch detection algorithm that looks like it is easily fast enough to use real time. On Friday Denis agreed to write a class that will read in a value in Hz, interpret it as a note on the musical scale, and give an appropriate visual cue. He hopes to be done this coming Thursday. On Saturday I wrote a simple class that obtains audio from a microphone and converts it into an array of shorts. Tomorrow (Monday) I hope to perfect that class and implement the pitch detector. So I hope to be ready come Thursday to meet with Denis and put everything together. Bottom line, I think we are going to get it done by this Saturday. And I think that the meeting of the goal will be a miracle, a gift from a loving God. And I think that miracles happen all the time.
Have a great week.
Doug
Elsie's Birthday is today! One year old already. Wow, has that passed fast! What a cute little toddler is coming to replace our infant of yesteryear! I ought to figure out how to post photos to this sight. She is a real cutie.
This was a neat week. I was in a meeting for most of the day on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. It seemed pretty much like an ordinary meeting. But when I stepped back and looked at what I was actually doing I couldn't help but be amazed. I was in a meeting between 12 world class scientists (they were the world class scientists and I was a welcomed observer), including a Nobel Prize physicist. And they were all sitting around brainstorming on the creation of a working, scalable quantum computer using neutral atoms and lasers. I pretty much just observed and learned. The next day I was in our yard shoveling manure. Br. Roberts from our ward (Vice President of the New Mexico Appaloosa Club or something like that and a former Navy Seal) and his brother-in-law dumped a truck load of manure onto a tarp in our front yard. I took a couple dozens of wheelbarrows full into our back yard.
The thing is that whether I was watching plans be drawn for a quantum computer or shoveling manure, when I didn't have to be thinking of the work at hand I was thinking of how to get up a skeleton program by the 15th of April. On Wednesday I found a computationally cheap (I hope) way to convert the array of little endian bytes into shorts. On Thursday I found a nice pitch detection algorithm that looks like it is easily fast enough to use real time. On Friday Denis agreed to write a class that will read in a value in Hz, interpret it as a note on the musical scale, and give an appropriate visual cue. He hopes to be done this coming Thursday. On Saturday I wrote a simple class that obtains audio from a microphone and converts it into an array of shorts. Tomorrow (Monday) I hope to perfect that class and implement the pitch detector. So I hope to be ready come Thursday to meet with Denis and put everything together. Bottom line, I think we are going to get it done by this Saturday. And I think that the meeting of the goal will be a miracle, a gift from a loving God. And I think that miracles happen all the time.
Have a great week.
Doug
posted by Douglas H. at 8:22 AM
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