Prospects for real quantum information processing devices in the laboratory

Some very hard things have to happen in the laboratory to make even rudimentary quantum information processing a reality. I will give a report "from the trenches" to give some idea of how you start from scratch -- in a state of the art solid state physics lab -- and try to make a working qubit. I will also give a point of view on progress on other fronts where things seem to be going better, in particular in the atomic physics lab.