It has been long overdue, but I’ve finally taken a giant step in my career. 1/11/11 was my last day working at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. I have left to start my own business, and I’m very excited about it. The last few days have been a flurry of paperwork, but I’m making progress and…
Author: Bob Baddeley
Mouse Modding
Last night I made some changes to my mouse; we’ll see if they’re improvements or not. Originally I was dismantling it to clean it. Something had gotten inside the wheel and was causing it to scroll inconsistently. Once I got inside, though, I saw an opportunity to tune it. First was the clicking on the…
Productive Sunday
This is a shining example of a highly productive Sunday afternoon. I separated the marshmallows out of the cereal. Then I threw away the cereal. Then I ate the marshmallows. That’s a normal sheet of paper to get a sense of scale. For what it’s worth, the cereal was stale and wasn’t going to get…
Autocross, wings, movie night, and a hike
This weekend I was busy. Saturday morning we went to the raceway in West Richland to watch some friends autocross. They weren’t scheduled to go until later, though, so we stayed for about an hour, then headed to another engagement; the Tri-City Wing Wars. The Wing Wars was a competition among local restaurants to see…
Getting things done is intimidating – until you start
My biggest lesson from U.S. History class in High School didn’t have anything to do with History. It was a lesson that’s stuck with me ever since, and it has affected me in many aspects of my life. Getting things done is really intimidating, until you start. Within the first month we had our initial…
Jump 29
Saturday morning I looked at the weather and it was not good. There was a good chance of rain, it was overcast, and the ceiling in Ritzville was 7500-9000 feet. My friend and I were supposed to go skydiving, but the weather made it seem like it might not happen. She called and they said…
Jumps 26-28
It’s been three years since I’ve been skydiving. Once Richland Skysports closed, I no longer had a local place to dive. It took the desire of a coworker to jump to motivate me to get back into it. I went the weekend before she was supposed to go so that I could take care of…
Trying something new
It’s been over a year since I’ve posted, which is not cool. I’d like to say it was the fault of the technology I was using, and that it was a hurdle, but that’s just making excuses. A lot has happened in the last year. The girlfriend and I have traveled to Vietnam, Thailand, Vancouver,…
What I Read
I’ve been doing a lot of interviews at work lately, and one of the questions I like to ask is what they read to keep current. In my job I am constantly evaluating new technologies and incorporating new things into our work, and it’s essential that I stay up to date with the latest in…
Laser Pointer Interface
A while ago I built a computer input device using a laser pointer and regular usb web camera. It was a pretty simple setup, and I used a lot of existing tools as a jumping off point. Here’s a writeup of my work and details for how to replicate it and what I learned. First,…