I Am Not What I Thought I Was

Every so often a person learns something about him- or herself that completely changes one's outlook on life.  Realization may arrive through third party observation, direct counseling, or the best life coach this century has to offer.*  Whatever the origin, these revelations can shake your foundations and certainly have a functional impact on, well, everything.  I had one of those experiences this week and I'm hesitant to even say it out loud, but I've decided that a blog post is the best way to share it with my closest friends and (hopefully) greatest supporters.

I am, apparently, left-eye dominant.

For years I've assumed I'm right-eye dominant.  I was very active in sports growing up; I used a right-handed stick in hockey, kicked a soccer ball with my right foot, and until I was in my twenties, I always used my right hand to hold my fork.  In hindsight, I probably should have suspected that I was different when I started using my left hand for fork manipulation as frequently as my right. 

Until now I've only shared this secret with a closely trusted spiritual advisor.**  He assured me that this isn't my fault.  Most likely the blame rests with my seventh grade typing instructor, who insisted that I use both hands.  That practice naturally led to a breakdown of the barriers between my true individual eye strengths, and other factors contributed over time to push me "over the edge" to left eyeism.  I don't know that it matters, though.  I'm here now, and the only way to live my life is to embrace it. 

You're probably wondering how I discovered this.  I was researching MD's birthday present and needed to know how to estimate the appropriate bow draw length for a teenager without having her measured at the archery range.***  I found an excellent formula for arriving at draw length (take the kid's wing span in inches and divide it by 2.5) and there was an accompanying article on determining eye dominance.  I did a simple test and...then I did it again.  And again.  The results don't lie, so neither can I: I've always thought I was right-eye, but I'm not.

Again, I should have seen the signs.  For years I've been shooting long guns left-handed (which I now understand was really shooting left-eyed) and I've developed a strong affinity and no small talent at shooting two pistols at once.  I'll bet the folks at the target range have been mocking me on the sly for a long time now; they can probably pick out left-eye dominance even before some poor sap like me recognizes it in himself.

I'm still reeling at the implications here.  How do I tell my family members?  I assume they'll feel a lot of shame, guilt, and then resentment that I caused them guilt.  Will they even want to know me?  Same thing with the other key people in my life -- my golf crew.  They've all got what can only be described as right-eye machismo; they've been solidly right-eye for decades and assumed I was too.  They're going to think I've been fooling them somehow; I'm not sure they'll understand that I've just come to understand this about myself.  At least I don't have to worry about notifying my HR department.****

Do I need to buy a whole new wardrobe?  Join a community or add #LeftEyeGuy hashtags to all my posts?  I'm probably going to start using a different brand of golf ball, at the least.  Baby steps.

I can tell you one thing -- it's at least a relief to finally be living with the real me.  There's nothing more painful than pretending to be something you're not, even when you didn't realize it yourself for the longest time.  I just hope the rest of the world will accept me.

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* You know, the Internet.

** We met via AOL, and he says he's a priest. Remember, a stranger is just a friend you haven't email with yet! 

*** The new bow hasn't arrived yet, but don't worry -- she doesn't read my blog.  Most people get to it via Facebook, and according to MD, "Facebook is for old people."

**** Dodged that bullet!  Whew.

The Business Of Being Funny and Some Questionable Priorities

Questionable priorities first.  PricewaterhouseCoopers has hired bodyguards for accountants Brian Cullinan and Martha Ruiz, the unfortunate pair who were responsible for handing over the Academy Award envelopes.  PwC is taking very seriously death threats the pair have received because of the mix-up with the Best Picture presentation.

That's right, death threats.*  Apparently the most crucial issue facing the nation today, the one that requires immediate, violent resolution, is the incorrect dissemination of envelopes at an awards ceremony.**  Now you know.

Speaking of movies, you're probably aware that I'm in the finishing stages of a board game involving a movie theme.***  The scripts, directors, and actors in Film Tycoons are parodies of real films and people, and two weeks ago I went through all the cards (300 of them) to try to ensure they were a) funny but b) not offensive. 

Possibly the best advice I've ever received.

The scripts were hard enough.  It's amazingly difficult to be funny 110 times in a row in four sentence increments.  Remember the quote, "Sorry I wrote such a long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one?"****  It's certainly a true phenomenon in humor -- it's much easier to be funny when you've got more words/time to do it.  That's especially true when you're taking care not to be mean.  In Film Tycoons we only included actors and actresses we like, so we wanted to keep the humor good-natured.  Not surprisingly, it's much easier to make some of the audience laugh when you make another part of the audience cry. 

Years ago I saw an interesting summary of the creative process for Mystery Science Theater 3000.  The crew described sitting at a conference table as they watched a movie, everyone throwing out random lines that came to mind.  Someone would track all the brainstorming, then they'd organize, decide to eliminate some options, and do it again.  And again.  And then refine.  And then polish.  By the time they actually recorded the show the creative team (which included the live actors) were probably awfully tired of the film they were panning.  I imagine they also started second-guessing the lines that seemed funny five days earlier, before they were repeated twenty times.

Overall, being funny isn't always fun, and at some points it feels like solving quadratic equations would be more entertaining.  But at least there's the occasional no-brainer when a movie like Avatar makes the parody process almost criminally easy.

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Avatar: the extremely rare element is called "Unobtanium?"  How do you come up with this stuff?

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* I don't think there's any way I would have believed this if I hadn't seen the movie The Accountant, which made me realize exactly how devious these people are.  But it also begs the question, why do they need bodyguards?  Apparently ninjitsu and explosives are required training for accountants.

** Why the need for violence?  I have a kinder, gentler proposal: track down the ancestry of the two accountants, identify the countries whence they came, and build a GIANT WALL to keep any more of these nefarious people from entering the United States!  That'll protect our awards shows!

*** Since you're reading my blog and I won't shut up about it...

**** Like many pithy quotes, I've seen this one attributed to a bazillion people: Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill...the list goes on.  Apparently Blaise Pascal is the earliest actual attribution.  That's right -- math geeks are funny!

Scaling

No, I'm not talking about dermatology here.  I'm not that kind of doctor.*  Last week in a blog about modularization of 3D printing I promised to return with more detail about that project.  This is one of those installments.  We're going to talk about one of my favorite aspects of OpenSCAD, the ability to use variables in 3D modeling. 

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This is a particularly interesting topic to me because variables probably seem second nature to those familiar with programming in other contexts, but they're not a fundamental concept to many 3D modelers, particularly those who use sculpting tools rather than scripting.  It's like English versus Russian.  Both tools serve the purpose of communication but a fundamental element of English, the article, doesn't even exist in Russian.  That's why Boris and Natasha are always looking for moose and squirrel rather than THE moose and A squirrel.

In this example I'm going to create the box bottom used for my dice/pawn box.  The catch is, I need different sizes of this box -- my Film Tycoons pawns are much taller than standard dice, so a box for the former must be taller than the latter.  Also, I may want to change the width of the box to accommodate more than six dice or pawns, right?  If I were doing this in a standard drag and drop visual editor I'd end up making multiple copies with slightly different sizes.  Very inefficient.   

Incidentally, if you develop an impromptu love of OpenSCAD and you're in the Dallas/Fort Worth area, I'm teaching an introductory course March 8th at the Maker Spot.**

Let's walk through some code!  This is an example, not a tutorial, so I'm going dive into it rather than building up from scratch.  If you're new to scripting I wouldn't expect you to learn the language from this.  Rather, if you're interested in 3D modeling I hope this'll inspire you to consider learning OpenSCAD to pursue it. 

Like many programming languages I'm going to start out defining a bunch of variables.  Ignore the $fn = 50 variable.***  The next three define the width, depth, and height of the box I'm building. 

Next, take a gander at the module boxbottom() declaration.  Like many other programming languages, this declaration and the curly braces create a set of code which can be invoked repeatedly.  In a drag and drop modeling program like Tinkercad you could click on a cube in a sidebar menu, drag it to the work environment, then click and drag handles to re-size it.  In OpenSCAD I can define a shape with a whole mess of code inside the { and }, then create instances of whatever was defined by simply typing boxbottom(). 

You might have noticed that the module declaration contains an optional variable, ih.  If the module is called without specifying a value the default of 1 will be used.  We'll get to that usage later.

Line 23 is my basic shape.  It's a cube with dimensions defined by three (four) variables: bbow, bbod, and bw+ih.  At their current values this provides me a cube 70mm long, 50mm deep, and 9mm high.  (bw is set to 4, and when I called the module in line 16 I set ih to 5.)   So far I've created a block of plastic.  Not very good for putting things in.

But wait!  Line 23 is actually enclosed in a function, difference().  The first line of difference() defines an object -- all subsequent lines are removed from that object.  So, I start with a cube in line 23, and in line 24 I take away a slightly smaller cube.  Do the math; the dimensions of the second cube are 62 x 42 x 5. 

Important side note: I want the second cube taken away from the center of the first cube.  See that translate() function in line 24?  It moves the forthcoming cube.  My two cubes both align at the origin of [0, 0, 0].  I'm using the variable bw to specify the thickness of my box wall, 4mm.  Translate() moves the second cube to the right by that much, then back by the same amount, then up. 

Of course, the focus here is the scalability.  What if I print this box and determine that 4mm isn't thick enough for the box walls?  Simple -- I change the variable bw.  Lines 23 and 24 adjust the outer cube and inner cubes accordingly.  Want the box to be bigger?  Change bbow to 100 and bbod to 75; all dimensions are adjusted accordingly.

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The second part of the boxbottom() module handles the upper part of the box bottom.  As you can see from the picture above the cavity of the box bottom isn't consistent -- the wall actually gets thinner at the top, which accommodates a pressure-fit overlap from the box lid.  I won't walk through the code for that, but will point out the translate() function in line 27.  It's outside the difference() function on the same line, so it applies to everything built in that difference() grouping.  Note the use of bw and ih there -- they raise the second part of the box bottom to the appropriate position.

Just a few more notes on the importance of scalability here.  First, the box bottom is only one piece of the overall "system."  Other modules create the box lid, the shaped inserts, and a name plate -- each of these pieces must scale, so they all rely on the variables defined at the top.  Second, I don't have to render just a single box.  OpenSCAD also allows me to use for-next loops and arrays, a combination which opens up far more possibilities.  More on that in a future blog; arrays are much more fun to demonstrate with Scrabble tiles or Fibonacci spirals, right?  Totally with you on that.

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* I first adopted the "DrUsual" handle when playing a first person WWII shooter game.  People invariably asked what kind of doctor I am.  I typically claim to be an Emergency Battlefield Proctologist. 

** Good seats are still available.

*** Okay, I'll tell you.  $fn is a special variable which determines the "roundness" of anything, well, round.  Set it to 6 and every cylinder becomes hexagonal.  Set it to 50 and cylinders are "pretty darn round."  Set it to 100 and they're "really darn round."  The higher this variable is set, though, the longer it takes for a model to render.

Nothing To Declare

From the I Thought Everyone Knew About This But Apparently It's Not As Common Knowledge As I'd Assumed" Department*, a brief introduction to Kickstarter rewards! 

Kickstarter is a crowdsourcing platform for potential businesses to raise funds.  Some intrepid entrepreneur creates a campaign such as, "I want to produce and sell this new lawn sprinkler gizmo, and it'll take me $20,000 to get up and running."  For the next 30 days backers can pledge amounts -- if at least the $20k goal is raised the entrepreneur gets the money, minus Kickstarter's cut.  If $19,999 was raised, the campaign fails.  If $120,000 was raised, the campaigner gets $120,000.   

The most common misconception I hear about KS and similar platforms is that the backers are either making an investment or a loan.  They're not.  The backers don't own any piece of the business, and their backing isn't going to be repaid as a loan.  People back Kickstarter campaigns for two reasons: the social/personal pride of being a patron of an art or business, and to get rewards.**

The reward system brings backers to Kickstarter.  Rewards are organized by tier.  If you pledge $20 or more you get Reward 1.  Pledge $35 or more and get Reward 2, which often includes Reward 1.  For example, I backed a campaign for someone who needed to buy a specialized tool for spinning yarn from alpaca fur.***  For my pledge I received two skeins of alpaca yarn.  If I'd contributed more I would have gotten more skeins.

Bite me, TSA!

What if the campaign doesn't reach its goal?  The backers aren't charged, and they don't receive any rewards.  I.e., nothing happens, except that our intrepid entrepreneur moves on for another try or goes another direction.

Here are two of my favorite campaigns from the past year.  First, I backed a game called Nothing To Declare.  Concept is great; you have see what you can smuggle through customs at an airport. (It's a card game, don't play this live-action, please.)  The basic rewards started with copies of the game, but I pledged at a level where I got to design a contraband card, which is now included in the game.   I provided two suggestions -- a live praying mantis or a copy of the script from Casablanca.  The awesome game designer, Paul Spencer, said "why not both?"  So, my movie-loving mantis is now immortalized as a card in the game.  (You can visit Apauling Games to get a copy, btw, if you missed out on the Kickstarter campaign!)

And another favorite: a western steampunk graphic novel!  The Legend of Everett Forge seemed like the kind of story that would make me want to read comics****, so...sign me up.  The KS campaign funded successfully and the first issue was fantastic, so I'm watching eagerly for the next one.  And like Nothing To Declare I chose a reward tier which allowed me to contribute something creative (and totally vain) to the finished product.  I won't go into a lot of detail on my part -- suffice to say that my reward is part of a special issue coming out later, and my friends will easily recognize it.  You should follow the Everett Forge Facebook page and watch for Scott Wilke's updates on his next campaigns; I'd love to see this series keep going.

That's your brief introduction to Kickstarter.  Tomorrow I'll be back on a brief run of 3D printing blogs, but I'll get back to crowdsourcing and start soliciting the hell out of my friends and family as my Film Tycoons Kickstarter campaign gets closer.  Stay tuned.

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* That's right, you're probably more familiar with this organization under their more simple moniker, ITEKAT BAITACKAIAD.  Sure, it takes some practice to pronounce and still takes up a lot of space on a business card, but TANSTAAFL.

** Face it, the majority of KS backers are there for rewards.  Some aren't -- I backed the development of a science and learning center in a city far from me just because I thought it was a great service to a community, and I'm sure many of the other backers didn't get a tangible reward either.  But compare the number of people make a $2 contribution for "our heartfelt thanks" versus those who make a $20 contribution for "a discounted copy of the product."  More of them want the product.

*** Fur or hair, I never remember which alpacas have.  I'm confident they don't have scales, though.

**** Similar to fur or hair, I've never been a stickler about "graphic novel" versus "comic book."  Apparently "comic book" isn't politically correct, or is diminishing, or some other such negative.  I could care less.  I love Starry Night, and I love dogs playing poker.

Don't Duplicate Your Databases. Or Oscar Envelopes.

Not the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  If you watched the Oscars last night (or if you have a pulse and either an Internet connection or TV this morning) you've probably already seen the finale -- Warrant Beatty announced that La La Land had won* Best Picture, the producers gave their acceptance speech, then the audience was told that a mistake had been made -- the Best Picture actually went to Moonlight. 

Apparently PricewaterhouseCoopers has a person waiting on each side of the stage, and each of these people holds an identical set of envelopes for the announcements.  (Their names are all ove the Internet, if you're that interested in personally vilifying them.)  When a presenter approaches, the person on that side hands the presenter an envelope.  See where this is going?

No Oscar for you!

After the Best Actress award was presented, one of the PwC folks was left with the unused envelope and accidentally handed it to Warren Beatty as he and Faye Dunaway approached to announce the Best Picture.  Beatty was confused by this, clearly.  I think he was trying to ask Ms. Dunaway about it; she saw La La Land next to Emma Stone's name and announced the film as Best Picture. 

Anyone with PMP certification could tell you this is a process just waiting for an error.  In fact, any perceptive 14 year old could tell you that.  Or a BI person -- this is why we get so pissy with people who want their own replication of a database "so I can do my own reporting."

We have to have two envelopes; we don't know from which side the presenters will approach.  How can you NOT know this?  It's one of the most choreographed events outside of the Super Bowl Halftime Show.  The seat numbers aren't assigned in that auditorium?  Even Cinemark assigns seats now when you want to see Resident Evil: This Series Just Won't Die.

It's never been a problem before.  So your success rate has been excellent in the past.  Good for the past!  Weigh the acceptable failure rate -- clearly, failing once for the Best Picture presentation isn't considered acceptable.  Likewise, an airline can make 4,999 safe landings and nobody says about a plane crash, "But it was only .02%!"**

We suppose you have a better solution?  Well, sure.  To start with, only print one set of data.  I mean, envelopes.  That'll reduce the chances of your end users giving conflicting information.  Second, plan ahead.  I know, strategic planning is so 1980's -- it's a lot easier to just hope for the best.  Third, if you really can't predict the direction the presenter will approach from, just have one envelope, and have Vanna White deliver it to the presenter after he/she has reached the microphone.  If anyone can make a superfluous activity seem vital and elegant, it's Vanna. 

At the very least, invest in some operations management.

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* Yes, I originally had "one" instead of "won" here.  Dragon Naturally Speaking is great, but everyone wonce in a while it chooses the wrong homonym and I miss it.  Thanks Eileen!

** It's probably not as extreme a comparison as you think.  People today seem to take it as personal betrayal that George R. R. Martin is so far behind on the next Game of Thrones novel, or that Burger King changed their menu.  I'm waiting for the protest marches to start.  Shouldn't be long; the conspiracy theorists are already hard at work.

Digital Sculptures

Recently Poloxamer, one of the admins on our Minecraft server, hosted a sculpture contest.  We gave contestants a month to work -- keep in mind that they had to gather their own materials to do it and they did everything in standard mode.  No flying, no mods to make things easier, just vanilla Minecraft and their own ingenuity.  So, the million tons of stone gathered for the Egypt sculptures?  The builder, Rethenut, pick-pick-pickaxed all of that.

Speaking of Egypt, here's Re's sphinx surrounded by some pyramids!  I haven't tried entering the pyramids yet, but I'm tempted to drop in there and summon a few ghasts or other treats for anyone who dares enter without Re's permission.  :)  For a fun math problem, take a look at those pyramids and estimate how much stone was required and how much time to gather it.  (And score extra points for good project management: Re got her husband to come in and help mine some of the stone!)

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Next is Jackshadow's "Treeo."  Jack leveled about a continent's worth of birch trees to construct these giant sculptures of...birch trees!  According to Polo, Jack also set a new world record for most lethal plummets while building a single structure.  This is why you leave your good armor at home when building something large, of course.

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Our resident 8-bit artist, HollyInGrd6, built another great piece of throwback art with the theme from Reading Rainbow!  (Suggestion: go tour this one while listening to the Big 80's on Sirius/XM channel 8.)  Holly took advantage of the wide variety of shaded glass available now in MC, which required gathering a few tons of sand and all the materials needed to create dyes.  It's even better viewed on the server, as you can get up close and see the glass.

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Stufak's Throne totally cracked me up when I realized what he was building.  The giant man blends in so well to the surrounding mountain that I probably stared at it for twenty seconds or so before actually seeing him.  I'm tempted to have a future contest where contestants have to build something that the recumbent titan is staring at. 

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And finally, we have Anneka's "How It Got There."  We need to implement a Best Use of Minecraft Gravity Rules award for this one.  I watched her building the Stonehenge replica and helped chase away some skeletons riding skeleton horses.  I had no idea at the time that there was going to be more than the henge in the final product.  And for a little added creativity -- if you expand the picture and look very closely you can just see the heads of the skeleton horses who are apparently piloting the ship.  :) 

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Machine Learning-ish

Hey Siri, find the CareNow clinic. 

I'm sorry.  I can't find anything called career now click.

Hey Siri, find the CARE NOW CLINIC.

I found an urgent care clinic in Jacksonville, about 1030 miles east of you.  Do you want me to get directions or call?

Machines.  Making your life simple.

Maker Space? What's That?

I'm so glad you asked.  I just happen to have an example.

A friend and I designed a tabletop game and reached a distinct milestone -- the game mechanics had been tested and re-tested (and re-tested and re-tested), the rules were solid, and all the card content was created.  Before sending the digital files to a printer for a production quality prototype we had one remaining step: work with a Real Artist to finalize the color scheme, graphics, and layout for the physical elements of the game.  We really wanted a physical copy of our concept board to examine with the artist.

Challenge: how do you print a 30" x 24" board at home?  We could print on standard 8.5" by 11" paper and piece it together, but the pieced-together look is distracting when you're trying to look at design quality, or sharing the board with people at a game design event. 

Welcome to the North Richland Hills Maker Spot.  This Maker space is hosted at the public library and made possible by a grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, as well as other organizations.  The best short description is "community workshop."  Most Maker spaces I've seen focus on two concepts: make available equipment that might be too expensive or otherwise prohibitive to have individually, and to facilitate the propagation of knowledge.

Case in point, our Maker Spot has an HP large format printer.  It prints on 36" rolls of paper, exactly what we needed for the game board.  It's connected to a Mac that has the full Adobe suite, and current price is $1 per linear foot of printing.  That's it -- copies of the game board for $3.  Considering that our next best offer was $40 with a half-day turnaround at a local print shop, this is more than a bargain.  Of course, I'm also unlikely to have a 36" printer at home -- the best deal I see on one on Amazon is $8,500.

Similar situation with other technologies.  The Maker Spot has 3D printers, a long arm quilting machine, an audio/visual production lab, electronics and woodworking equipment, and all manner of learning kits.  And there are classes.  Sharing of knowledge is a staple activity of all Maker spaces, and ours has a fantastic array of free classes -- you can learn sewing, 3D modeling, Arduino, Adobe, Raspberry Pi...not to mention Internet safety, small business start up, electronic privacy, and more.  My daughter and I have taught a few classes there on building devices in both Minecraft redstone and physical electronics. 

Different Maker spaces offer different equipment and classes, depending on the local need, interest, and availability.  I've seen some with full-scale auto garages, others with more electronics than a Radio Shack warehouse, and some offering pottery and crocheting classes.  Ours is definitely an invaluable community resource, especially if you're printing board game prototypes. 

Modularization, the Musical

Editorial note: I didn't actually write a musical about modularization.  I just liked the title, and have a theory that Melissa Schmitz only reads my blog if there's alliteration involved.  Sorry for misleading you.

I combined a few projects today to make a gift for someone, as well as some potential prizes for people when we launch our Film Tycoons Kickstarter campaign.  I've been 3D printing personalized dice for a long time and shared earlier the custom pawns I made for the game -- yesterday I built a box specifically for these types of toys. 

But not just any box!  It's a modularized box!  Or rather, the OpenSCAD code to generate the box is modularized.  The point: efficiency of flexibility.  The OpenSCAD script results in one command for each of the box parts: the bottom, the lid, the part-specific insert, and the name plate. You can produce many configurations of the box with hardly any time required, no cloning, re-modeling, etc.

Eric Hallberg, if you're reading this, feel free to borrow the technique for the automobile industry.  Seriously, no charge.  Happy to share.  :)

The lid changes size simply by changing a variable.  The dice fit in the box with the default lid size, so rendering the lid is as easy as typing boxlid().   The Film Tycoons pawns are taller, though, so boxlid(14); makes a taller lid to accommodate.  Likewise, the nameplate is a separate piece which fits somewhat snugly (and even more so with a little epoxy) to the lid; I could have printed the name directly in the lid, but the separate plate allows for a lot more flexibility.

The round or square inserts -- similar approach.  Specify the size of the holes in the insert and the code centers them appropriately. Most important here is that by printing the insert separately the box bottom can be printed ahead of time.  (I didn't take the extra step of combining the round-hole and square hole inserts in a single code block, but I'll likely do that before blogging about the actual code.)

Odd "box" trivia: the Simon & Garfunkel song The Boxer is NOT about a dog after all!

Oh, and the length and width of the box?  Also variable-driven.  If I needed ten dice for that Super Secret Professional Double Yahtzee League, it's just a matter of tweaking two numbers and you suddenly have a ten-die box. 

The only part of the project that can't be tweaked and re-printed in seconds* is the Chinese writing.  That's a bigger challenge than putting text on the nameplate; the characters have to be brought into another program as a graphic, converted to a format OpenSCAD can understand and extrude as a 3D object, then incorporated into the model.  Another topic for a later blog.

And Missy, I still feel slightly guilty about the alliteration/musical thing, but I'll try to make it up to you.  Maybe with some 3D printing haiku or something.  You're welcome in advance.

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* That's not exactly true.  Nothing 3D prints in "seconds."  At least, not in so few seconds that it wouldn't be more appropriate to measure in minutes or hours.  The more accurate way to say this would be, "...tweaked and started re-printing in seconds."

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My Decor, My Education, And Dinosaurs

Once you reach 35 or so, or after your daughter approaches teenage status (which ages Dad 10 years for every one of her birthdays, I'm convinced) it's pretty natural to start playing the "what would I have done differently?" game.  One of my favorite variations is "what would I have major in if I could go back now?"  Or the spin-off edition, "Dear daughter: you're not majoring in history.*" 

I've played this game for the better part of a decade, wondering which of my interests would have been better served with formal education and resulted in my launching a company that would change the world.  I used to think this was just idle musing, but it turns out, I've found the answer.

If I could go back to school, I'd major in a combination of Low Dimensional Geometric Topology. 

Why?  Simple.  I want to figure out why this damned area rug in my office won't lie flat.

The rug is the perfect size for covering up the center of the room.  I pull it flat numerous times every day but it always manages to bunch back up -- and it always bunches in the direction of the bookshelves, between which is the egress.  This makes no sense to me.  Sure, I pace a lot while I'm on the phone.  I walk constantly between my desk, the 3D printer, and the worktable.  However, one would have to assume that for every southward trip (toward the door) I'm making a northward trip (toward the desk.)  I assure you that I never leap from my desk to the tile outside the office door.

There must be a mathematical principle responsible for the constant wave pattern that appears in my rug throughout the day.**  I've considered attaching the rug to the floor, but then it would no longer be a rug, it would be a carpet.  That might solve the physical problem but wouldn't provide understanding.  And as Jurassic Park taught us, achieving a result without philosophical comprehension leads to bad things.

Rest assured, when I have the leisure time available to earn a doctorate in mathematics, I'll focus on solving this problem for my own good and that of all other office dwellers. 

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*Just to be clear, I didn't major in history.  I love history and have Randolph Campbell's Gone To Texas on my frequent re-read list, but even at 20 I realized that a history degree doesn't pave the way to many occupations.  I majored in pre-law, the obvious choice for a guy who's going to spend 20 years working in business intelligence and databases.

**I've considered and rejected the philosophical theory that my rug bunches toward the door because I'm eager to leave my workplace and thus, put a bit more energy in trips of that direction.  I love being at my desk and feel quite comfortable there, so I think the energy expended in each direction is balanced.

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More Fun With Electricity!

I finally got around to a bit more guided testing of my conductive ABS plastic this week, thanks to some direction from /u/eb86 and /u/SaffellBot from Reddit.  They suggested to simply measure the resistance of the conductive filament rather than the voltage drop.  Eb86 also gave me more direction on measuring the voltage drop with the filaments in series and the multimeter in parallel -- haven't gotten to this yet, but I will soon.

If you haven't read my previous blogs on this subject I'll repeat the disclaimer that I'm a horrible dabbler with electronics.  I've no issues with admitting my amateur status at anything (it's a pretty good approach for learning stuff, you know) and I love it if my dabbling inspires other people, but remember -- everyone's responsible for not burning down his or her own house.

This one's a pretty safe experiment.  Same 3D printed conductive block that I described in this blog.  This time I simply plugged the multimeter directly into the block to measure the resistance.  The reading was a pretty steady 143k ohms.  That's a heck of a lot more than the 330 ohm resistors that I normally use with my LEDs; I'm surprised the LED lights up at all with the conductive filament in the circuit.

Simple result: while this arrangement does conduct electricity, the resistance is pretty high.  (Sounds like I could be describing a marriage at times, huh?)

Appropriate music suggestion: Muse, "The Resistance."

Yesterday's experiment also resulted in a mystery*.  When my 3D printed block is in the circuit without a resistor the LED doesn't light at all.  Logic suggests that the resistor and block together would increase the resistance, but no one ever said that logic is key to science, right?

The logical next step (to me) is to print some different configurations of the conductive filament and figure out which offers the least resistance.  I've already got this latest one at 90% infill, is the resistance higher or lower with more dense infill?  Is the diameter of "wire" a contributing factor?  Like a circuit board, perhaps a very thin layer of conductive plastic is better than the wire I have now -- say, .1mm or .2mm as opposed to ten times larger.

More to come...but after I've finished more of my actual work for Film Tycoons.

---

*By "mystery" I mean, "I don't know the answer to this, though it's very likely that someone with more knowledge of this subject probably sees my mystery as a basic fundamental concept.  You can laugh, but you know who you're coming to when you're trying to figure out a SQL database, don't you?

Crappy Endings and The Best Movie Ever Made

In the past two weeks I've seen three movies.  Small perk of being "between opportunities" or "impacted."*  My severance package doesn't include movie tickets, but it does enable me to take long lunch breaks every once in a while.  Since this is the 75th anniversary of Casablanca it's showing on the big screen, and there's no way I'm missing an opportunity for that.

I think even Christopher Walken is creeped out by Mr. McAvoy here.

Of the two new releases I saw: the first was a fairly mediocre movie but the final 30 seconds made me overwhelmingly glad I'd seen it and eager to see a follow-up.  The second was a brilliant, magical story, beautifully done, and the final 30 seconds almost completely ruined my enjoyment of the previous two hours.  The first movie was M. Night Shyamalan's latest effort, "Split."  I won't name the second movie because I don't want to dissuade anyone from seeing it; you may find the ending enjoyable. 

Incidentally, I didn't say the ending was BAD.  I said it ruined my experience.  Considering that I'd been enraptured by the movie until that last bit, that's a bad thing.

There are dozens of things that make Casablanca the Best Movie Ever Made.  Give me a call if you want to spend three or four hours discussing them all.  Here's the relevant one for today's blog: the ending was almost impossible to write, yet came out brilliant.

Here's the gist: Rick and Ilsa meet in Paris shortly before the German occupation begins.  Ilsa believes her husband, Victor, was killed by the Nazis.  She and Rick have a whirlwind romance.  When the Germans roll into town they need to flee -- but Ilsa finds out at the same time that Victor is still alive, so she leaves Rick hanging at the train station. 

Rick sets up shop in Casablanca and tries to forget about Ilsa.  A year later, she and Victor show up, still on the run from the Germans.  Ilsa was unaware Rick had moved to Casablanca.  Other important details: Rick still loves Ilsa.  Ilsa loves both men.  Victor can only be safe if he can get to America, and Rick is the only person who can get Victor out of Casablanca. 

Turns out Rick can choose how the story ends.  He and Ilsa can flee together, leaving Victor to a death sentence, or he can send Ilsa and Victor away together. 

The studio dilemma was pretty straightforward.  In 1942 there was no way a censor board would allow Rick and Ilsa to stay together without Victor dying.  (In fact, they had convulsions over Rick and Ilsa having their Paris affair; it was only allowed because she thought Victor dead.)  Leaving Victor to the mercy of the Nazis certainly wasn't an acceptable thing for our hero to do in '42, either.  The writers had to figure out an ending that would leave audiences happy despite Bogie being left with a (second) broken heart.  And they managed to do it perfectly.

How do you measure "perfect?"  Start with this: no remakes in 75 years.  Even fantastic movies like From Here To Eternity have suffered from the remake plague.  Not Casablanca.  Studios consider it "untouchable," as Madonna found out when she tried to remake it with (wait for it) Ashton Kutcher as Rick. 

Yeah.  Ashton Kutcher.  Sorry, kid.  You'll never have Paris.

Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.

*You have to see the humor in your tough situations, and a favorite of mine is the tendency for people to use euphemisms instead of saying "laid off."  We're the "impacted."  It sounds like the name of a TV series.  The Afflicted.  The Infected.  The Impacted.**

**I realized I could name an awful lot of movies with "Impact" in the title.  Deep Impact.  Double Impact (with Jean-Claude van Damme!).  Sudden Impact.  Deadly Impact.  Final Impact.  That last one had Lorenzo Lamas.  Do you remember Lorenzo being in Grease?  I sure don't.

Oh, Amazon Prime, How You Spoil Me

Last December I thought it'd be fun to 3D print replacement tiles for my Settlers of Catan game.  The Catan board is made by placing hexagonal tiles next to each other; each tile represents one lot of resource-rich land (either wood, wheat, wool, brick, or ore) and the set is surrounded by sea tiles, which may have harbors for trading.  The junctures where three tiles come together provide spaces for villages and cities to be built, and the borders between tiles are roadways. 

I chose this tile set from Thingiverse for one feature -- small holes along the underside of each tile allow magnets to be placed inside.  The magnets are just strong enough to keep the tiles together during incidental bumping throughout the game.  (Otherwise the game could be retitled Settlers of San Andreas.) 

The preferred magnets are pretty specific: 3mm diameter spheres.  Go ahead.  Search for "spherical magnet" on Amazon.  You'll find that the world's biggest retail clearinghouse comes up pretty dry.  But no fear, the Thingiverse designer provided a link to a company in China which sells these.  The company is called TinyDeal, and back on December 16th I ordered myself a few boxes.

"It seems to run on some sort of electricity!"

Fast forward -- no, wait.  Crawl forward to February 1st and my magnets arrived. 

Sure, the magnets came from China.  The customer's expectations should be set appropriately; it takes a long time to ship goods from China.  Problem is, some behemoth has been steadily resetting the general expectations of the American consumer in regard to shipping time.  With Amazon Prime we regularly receive goods in two days, one day, or even the same day that we ordered them.  During the Super Bowl they even advertised the possibility of receiving your Doritos via drone in minutes, right?  If my craving for simulated nacho cheeze flavoring can be quenched in an hour, surely my need for tiny magnetic parts can be accommodated in less than six weeks.

The business lesson is pretty obvious -- scarcity is the only compelling factor to order from TinyDeal.  And even that could be alleviated easily by someone who orders in quantity, stores in the U.S., and is able to fulfill my magnetic need for just a few dollars more, but within days.  That's worth paying for, right?  I'm going to refer to this theoretical concept as importing.   Maybe I'll see it during my lifetime, though I'm pessimistic.  I'm still waiting on my flying car.

Running Time: In Search Of...

This week I got back on the horse.  Or at least, back on the treadmill.  About ten days ago I overdid it a bit; I was running on a Saturday and feelin' fine, getting my In Search Of on.  In fact, I was enjoying the run so much that I watched nearly four episodes: "Atlantis" first, then "Psychic Detectives" and "A Call From Space," followed by half of "Learning ESP."  Total time was 71 minutes, or just over seven miles.

Can you think of a better hero for a 13 year old girl?  Besides her dad, of course!

The next day I got through the second half of "Learning ESP," just about one mile.  Almost immediately my knee started to hurt.  I thought I'd "run it out."  That mile was enough to convince me that I was "running it worse," so I called it a day and researched iliotibial band syndrome instead.  Short story: overuse.  Rest until it doesn't ache, then do more cross-training.

Fortunately for both of you who eagerly awaited my next 70's TV review I was able to run again this week.  I caught "Nazi Plunder" on Tuesday and "Amelia Earhart" Thursday.  Since things are holding up pretty well my next run will include both "Dracula" and "The Easter Island Massacre."

One thing struck me about both "Nazi Plunder" and "Amelia Earhart."  As of today both these episodes stand the test of time.  Numerous tantalizing hints exist pointing to yet-unfound treasure ditched by Nazi officials fleeing the fall of the Reich.  And of course, despite tremendous research and searching, Amelia Earhart's disappearance has yet to be definitively explained.  Considering that these episodes are 40 years old and covering subjects from 30 to 35 year prior to that, it's pretty impressive that they can still be intriguing today. 

My Stakeholder's Hidden Agenda

One of the most common phenomenon* in business intelligence is the mismatched ends: you've gathered requirements, think you've gone through them ad nauseum, but weeks later the dashboard is delivered and the stakeholder says, "This doesn't meet my need."

Like any decent phenomenon** the Mismatched Ends mystify us.  That in itself is puzzling; given that the phenomenon occurs often/regularly/daily, one would think there's plenty of opportunity to study, solve, and avoid it.  And like any decent phenomenon the best place to seek an explanation is often the mind of a child.

The child in this case is my daughter, MD.  When MD was eight she and I started an annual ritual we call the "Dad and Daughter Adventure Trip."  We identify at least one Really Cool Thing to do, vow to stop at every Potentially Cool Thing on the way, and hit the road.  Sometimes the Adventure Trip includes a life lesson or at least a good learning experience.***

When MD was 13 we took our golf clubs with us on the Adventure Trip.  This one was a road trip through west Texas, and Texas in general is blessed with a bazillion golf courses.  MD navigates on road trips and quickly took on the job of finding golf courses to play.  She settled on a few criteria right away: no private clubs, and preferably no 9-hole courses.  She's also very price-conscious, a characteristic I hope she maintains through high school.

Over the week we played at three different courses and each turned out to be a great choice.  There were some consistencies in her selection -- even when near a large metro area she'd pick courses on the outskirts.  The courses never seemed to be very busy, and most of them were very duffer-friendly.  (Long, wide fairways with little water or trees.)  I finally asked how she was making the final selection in each area and found she had one very simple criterion: she was checking the course rules to find out if she could drive the golf cart.

That's it.  After the basic assumptions that we'd agreed upon she added one high priority condition.  She wanted to drive the cart.  I never would have guessed that this was important enough to influence her overall evaluation of courses, but it turned out to be absolutely critical. 

And this agenda item was "hidden" by her for some reason -- one strong possibility is that this was important enough to her that she assumed I already knew about it myself.  It's also possible that she was embarrassed a little by it and decided to own the search herself rather than vocalize the need.  I actually think it's the former -- after all, we both clearly understand that the most important criteria in selecting a hotel is the availability of a pool, so shouldn't Dad just know about the golf cart?

*Notice the clever use of the word "phenomenon."  It almost sounds positive, like, "Whoa!  Look at the fascinating thing we've discovered!"  This approach, rather than negative implication words like "challenge" or "problem" helps keep everyone feeling like we're making progress even though we've encountered setbacks and delays.  It's the same reason the safety briefing card on an airplane shows everyone smiling as they don life jackets and plummet toward the ocean.

**A few of my favorite phenomena in the U.S. include the Marfa Lights, the Devil's Kettle, and the Great Stalcpipe Organ.  You should leave your desk, go visit one of these places, and return to work with a sense that you're now prepared to completely dominant mundane tasks like requirements gathering.

***One of my favorite life lessons was, "Listen to Dad when he says you shouldn't eat three cheese Danishes right before a 12 mile hike at an elevation one mile higher than where you live."

Added Value Explained

I tidied up my office yesterday, a process which largely involves a) discarding bits and pieces of early 3D printing experiments, b) discarding bits and pieces of board game prototypes, and c) filing or discarding papers that have clearly passed the threshold of "every day use" and must now be relegated to either recycling, filing cabinet, or three-ring binder.  During that third stage I found what might be the most important business document ever: a worksheet my older daughter, MD,  completed at school in first grade.

The scan's a bit hard to read, so here's question #3: Alena wants to buy a sticker for 45 cents.  She hands the cashier 1 quarter, 1 dime, and 2 nickels.  Did Alena give the cashier enough money for the sticker?

The answer, of course, is yes.  The sticker costs 45 cents (holy inflation!) and Alena hands the cashier 45 cents.  MD dutifully shows her work (25 + 10 + 10 = 45) and says, "Yes." 

But that's not all.  In the margin she adds, "but not with tax though."  And there you have the two simple keys to defining and identifying added value.  Information beyond the simple correct answer was provided, and that information was of vital, practical importance to the end user. 

The smiley face and "I love it!" is from her teacher.  That's the added value litmus test: the end user recognizes that the information provided went above and beyond the minimum correct answer AND provided insight that could help avert a negative situation or facilitate a greater success. 

I showed this to my team members seven years ago and it's occupied various spots in my office ever since.  Though there's a pretty good size file of paper memories for her in my closet, I think this one's going back up on the office wall for another few years.

I Have No Job, But I Have A 3D Printer

(I thought that was a bit catchier title than, "Conductive Filament Part 2."  At least it gets fewer conflicting hits on Google, right?)

I meant to post this earlier in the week but as the title subtly hints, I was laid off on Monday.  That took a bit of wind out of my blogging sails this week.  Ironic, given that I've abruptly had time on my hands.  On the plus side, I'm interspersing my job search time with 3D tinkering and helping get the new 3D printers set up at my daughter's school, so...let's do some more filament testing.

In Part 1 of this subject I started testing the actual conductivity of STAR Alchement's Conductive ABS Filament.  In technical terms, the results were middlin'.  While my printed coupler did conduct electricity, it dropped the 8V output from my battery to just over 4V.  I decided to change a few things on the next attempt.

I was out of bananas, so I used a penny for scale.

The coupler in this experiment is regular ABS (Hatchbox Gold, not to be confused with the awesome double album, ABBA Gold) while the inside is Alchement's Conductive.  The sockets are the same size cones described in the first blog; the wires pressure fit snugly into the ends of the block.  Each cone tapers down to a 2mm diameter cylinder, and the entire arrangement is 40mm long.

One other key change -- I separated the processes and used different infill densities.  The gold box is 25% infill, same thing I use for most prints.  The conductive part, however, is at 90% infill. 

Similar test to before.  Measure the battery output alone, then add the coupler to the circuit and measure again.  No need for a "before" shot this time, it's pretty much the same as the first time.  (It's the same battery, same battery clip, and I promise I haven't been running my Walkman off it in the intervening week.) 

You can see the results below. Although the voltage still isn't at the full 8V the battery was putting out before, it's much higher at 6.26 than the 4V from the first piece that I printed.  It was also quite steady.  Once the wires were seated firmly the reading hardly budged.  The obvious conclusion is that the 90% infill made the major difference. 

Next steps will be trying a few more variations of the "wire."  The connecting wire here is 2mm diameter over 20mm (each of the sockets is 10mm deep) and perhaps that volume causes more diffusion.  (Mike Patterson, if you're reading this, stop laughing.  My line is business intelligence, not electrical engineering.)  After a visit to PAX South this weekend I'm going to print more models with 1mm or .5mm wires and see if I get any noticeably different results. 

First Test of the Conductive 3D Filament

One of my favorite things about 3D printing as a hobby is that new capabilities are developing almost daily.  It seems like a new type of filament is on the market every day, or someone has assembled a new extruder to do anything from create edible cake decorations to pouring concrete housing.  A while ago I ordered [STAR] Alchement's Conductive ABS filament and this week I started testing it out.  The significance of this as a printing capability is pretty obvious.  If you've also got an interest in electronics, it's possible to simply print some circuitry as opposed to leaving cavities for electronic parts in your prints.  My dual extruder printer should be particularly well suited for this -- print regular ABS from one extruder for the main print, and conductive from the other to make "wires" through the print.

Of course, this all depends on whether or not the conductive filament is truly conductive.

The Amazon reviews aren't promising.  To date there's one question asked: is the filament truly conductive?  One person has answered, and he rather vehemently says no, it's not conductive at all.  Likewise, the sole review gave the filament three stars and claims that it's not conductive "by any means." 

Well, I've got a roll and I like Alchement's other filaments, so let's give it a try.  Here's my disclaimer: I've only run one test so far.  I'm going to modify some of the prints to see if I can improve the results.  I wouldn't claim that this first bit of data is conclusive.

For a simple conductivity test I printed a little connector, pictured to the right.  It's just a rectangle of filament, 40mm long, 2mm sides.  The final 10mm at each end is a hollowed out cone, 1mm wide at the very end, narrowing down to .4mm.  Hence, a jumper wire or the leg of an LED or resistor pressure fits into the socket and there are 20mm of "solid" filament between the two sockets.  (Quotes around "solid" because I printed this at 50% infill.  One of the next things I'll toy with is printing the "wire" at 100% infill.)

Quick printing specs: because I'm dealing with a pretty small part and want the sockets to work well I changed my primary layer height to .1mm.  The bed is set at 105C and the extruder at 230C.  It printed quite nicely at these settings and given how small the part is, it took about 10 minutes.)

Time for some measurements.  The picture on the left is the multimeter hooked up directly to the 9V battery.  Not surprising, I'm getting just under 8V.  (It's a veteran battery.)  On the right, I've gone from the battery to my filament connector, then a jumper wire to the multimeter probe.  Noticeable drop in voltage, down to 4V, but it IS conductive.

Some immediate thoughts: it's possible that my socket design isn't the best.  The wires are all plugged in pretty tight; they won't fall out of the sockets without a good tug.  It's worth looking at, though.  Also, the aforementioned infill of the wire.  In the current configuration (no pun intended) my "wire" is 4 square mm with 50% infill.  When printing this as a wire inside another model I plan on making the wire a 1mm cylinder at 90% or 100% infill. 

Of course, the multimeter is good for testing but not really a fun application.  Here's a little more visual evidence of the difference, using an LED to demonstrate.  Again, straight hookup on the left, conductive filament socket in the mix on the right.

Early conclusion: hell yeah, it's conducting electricity!  No disappointment here, it's time for more experimentation.  :)

Low Carb Jump Start!

So, it's Friday and you're going to start low-carbing Monday.  Excellent!  If you're not accustomed to a low carb diet it's pretty hard to stick with it more than a few days, in my opinion.  More than the first few days, that is.  It definitely gets easier the longer you do it; after I'd spent six months on low carb (low enough to be in ketosis constantly) I found that I could spend a few days eating carbs again and easily get back into low carb mode.  Those first couple of weeks were a struggle, though, so here are suggestions that I think are key to getting started.

First, one of the easiest excuses for dropping out of low carb is, "I don't have what I need to make low carb food right now."  Plan ahead to avoid that.  Go to RuleMe.com and AllDayIDreamAboutFood.com and /r/ketorecipes and all the other great places to find low carb recipes.  Find some that look good, and go out to get the ingredients NOW.  Get eight blocks of cream cheese.  Get meat.  Lots of meat.  And eggs, and seasonings.  Stock up on keto-friendly cooking stuff now so you aren't caught unprepared later."

Next, figure out your favorite salad stuff and again, stock up.  I eat a salad with baby spinach leaves, ranch, feta cheese, and some kind of protein (turkey bacon bits, shrimp, or chicken) at least once per day and ideally twice.  It helps you feel full so you don't get hungry between meals.

Snacks!  Snacks can be the bane of low keto.  I found I really like the Atkins bars and some of the Atkins candy.  They're really convenient if I'm in a hurry, and I can sneak them into the movie theater.  Likewise, I like the store bought cheese crackers (Moon Cheese and Cello Whisps) and recently started making my own in the dehydrator.  Have that stuff nearby so that when you have to snack, you can do it low carb.

Quantity in cooking.  If you're going through the trouble of making a new recipe, make enough that you'll be able to eat for the next few days.  I love the cheesy chicken and pepper soup recipe I found, and I make it in batches that will give me four meals.  Combine that with having some other stuff already prepared, and I can go four or five days without cooking, but without relying on Atkins bars and cheese to get by.

Finally, find a tracking app and use it religiously.  I started out using MyFitnessPal, but now I'm using Fitbit's app for both my exercise and calorie intake tracking.  Which is good, since it easily shows me my calorie deficit.  Most important, though, is that tracking your calories and carbs keeps you really aware of what you're eating.  If your goal is to stay in ketosis you need to make sure your carb count is very low.  If you're working on weight loss, you want to be tracking the calories as well.  This was a big one for me -- after six to eight weeks of tracking nutrition to stay in ketosis, I found it much easier during my carb-ful breaks to stay in a good calorie deficit despite eating carbs.

Most important note -- keep getting back on the horse.  Remember, it's a long haul, not a sprint.  If you can sprint for a while, great, but overall, health is something you're maintaining over decades, not days.  If you deviate from your desired course one day, just get back on track and try again.

Dialing In My Frustrating Frustum

Yesterday I decided it would be fun to create a 3D model of a pyramidal frustum.  I have no idea how this popped into my head, but I've decided to blame it on my friend Mike P., from way back in junior high and high school.  Mike had a great knowledge of the esoteric and was quite a good artist.  It's quite possible that while we were playing Car Wars one day he made an offhand comment like, "If I designed a house it would be a pyramidal frustum."  That'd be just like Mike.

So yesterday I decided to model my own pyramidal frustum, and because no project can be left simple, I decided to embed Fibonacci spirals in the faces.  (Plus, anything with a Fibonacci spiral is automatically +5 in Mysterious, right?)  You can see the OpenSCAD code for the modeling if you like, but here I'm going to talk about dialing in the FlashForge Dreamer settings to make a nice print.

The four prints in the photo are ordered left to right from first printed to final print.  The first print's pretty bad.  The copper layers are really uneven and the edges are stringy. The blue spirals look terrible -- the second extruder leaked blue filament everywhere, yet somehow managed to not fill well in the print itself.  Go figure.  I'm using Simplify3D to slice and in that first print, the Hatchbox bronze PLA was set at 180 while the Metalink blue was set to 200.

(My Dreamer has upgraded nozzles which tend to make Hatchbox PLA print at lower temps than the original nozzles.  However, I just got this Metalink filament recently and used it to print all the sea tiles for a Settlers of Catan set quite nicely at 200C.)

For the second attempt I decided to turn on retraction and coast at end.  I was trying to avoid using a priming pillar because pillars really add to the length of a print.  I find that the priming pillar needs to be 10 or 12 mm square, minimum, to NOT break away from the print bed.  When your pyramid is 30mm square at the base, that priming pillar adds significantly to the overall print time.  So, retraction on to 2mm, coast at end of Simplify3D's default .2mm.  Result: a still very crappy looking frustum.

Third attempt: increased the retraction to 5mm and the coast at end to 2mm.  (Yeah, that's a big jump in the coast value.)  I also lowered the temp on my Metalink filament to 190, since it was still leaking little drops of blue all over the place.  The threading seems to have gotten even worse in this one.

Fourth try: all right, I'm turning on the ooze shield.  I use this feature a lot when I print dice, since it helps prevent cross-contamination of the filaments.  I'd been trying to avoid this since it adds to the print time; not quite as badly as the prime pillar, but noticeably.  In this case, the print time went from 36 minutes to almost exactly an hour.  Yikes. 

On the other hand, the ooze shield made that fourth frustum come out far nicer than any of the previous attempts.  I did leave my retraction and coast set the same as the third attempt, but the ooze shield clearly made the biggest difference.  I'll have to experiment further with tweaking the retraction, extra restart distance, and other related settings.  For now though, when someone has a critical need for a pyramidal frustum, I'll have to stick with the ooze shield.