Hamming Windows, Halloween, and Inspiration

This starts last Sunday when I was working on an assignment for my DSP class. My problems started when I got the Hamming and Hanning (or Hann) windows confused. Look at the equations for both of the windows and you can see how close they are. At first I thought I had to explicitly code each equation to magically create the windows. Even though I had an example for another kind of window, I had no idea how to do this.

The notes gave an example of a Hanning window complete with the equation and then asked me to use a Hamming window and gave me its equation. When I read this I thought both of them were Hanning windows with the second one being implemented with a slightly different equation. I tried many things, but I could not create the window or even reproduce the example in the notes.

Then around 5:45 Sunday afternoon inspiration hit. I realized the example and the exercise were two different functions, I did not have to code them directly, the earlier example in the notes was unnecessarily long and drawn out, and MATLAB has built in functions for Hanning, Hamming, Tukey, Kaiser, and Rectangular windows. I was very pleased I figured this out.

Moments later I was struck by an unrelated inspiration. I remembered how much I enjoyed Halloween when I was a child. At some of the houses I went to the adults distributing candy were very into Halloween. In Ohio, my neighbor across the street made a witch head and answered the door with it scaring the children, while some people just handed out candy in normal attire. I thought it would be great if I dressed up when I answered the door. Since I had 15 minutes and had not worn a Halloween costume for a few years, my options were limited. However, I remembered a mask I had in the garage, a coat I had never worn before, and a hat and gloves from when I was a magician. After finding all of this in a few minutes, this was the result.



The children were scared. Many of them commented on my costume. A couple of people thought I had a gorilla mask, while I think it looked more like a skeleton mask with the bones colored black and the teeth white.

In the large groups of trick or treaters, some of the really little kids saw me and were scared to walk from the sidewalk up to the door to get candy. I had to get as low as possible and hold the candy in front of me so the four year olds would not be intimidated. My costume was an overwhelming success.

On a class related comment, now might be a good time to start looking at the lecture notes, reading the textbook, or working on the assignment due at 11 tonight. If inspiration is going to strike again, I better be ready for it.