This one’s a double-header:

Eric Sink talks about how to find a product to build (if you’re a micro-ISV).

Joel talks about how much to charge for your product.

Both are excellent but both convince me yet again that such things are more luck than skill (which sucks for those of us that consider themselves skillful).

I just got back from a 3-family, 6-day trip to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico (“a pleasant fishing village paved over for tourist hotels”) and it was fabulous. Since it was before “the high season,” we had the place practically to ourselves. In fact, even though it was an all-inclusive place, the wait staff probably outnumbered the guests 3 to 1 at any given time. And it wasn’t as if they skimped on the food or the drinks, either! Every day, we had a giant buffet for breakfast, snacks by the pool for lunch and a 3-hour, 5-course meal for dinner. Plus, the weather was great and the pools were heated, so it was practically perfect.

The one blemish was when we drove to La Paz and couldn’t get out again. The detour signs pointed the wrong directions and all of the highways had the same number. We literally left and returned to La Paz 4 times, including the time we had to drive the rent-a-car guy back to his offer when something on the road disabled our car and we had to get a replacement. In 10+ years of business travel, I’ve never taken the comprehensive insurance until that day. I only had to pay for the half of tank of gas that I couldn’t fill up myself because to do so would’ve destroyed the engine (the rental company failed at first to see this as an argument for charging me less than 4x the going rate for gas, but I did eventually talk them down to only charging me 2x the going rate…).

Oh, and snorkeling rocks! We went to a calm little beach with a driver that brought all of the equipment, kayaks and a cooler of beers! But, I was completely distracted at my first snorkeling expedition ever. At first, I was blown away at the clarity of what I could see under the water and the ease with which I could breath (I expected to swallow a lot of water). Then, I was completely freaked out at the shear number of fish under the water (thousands!), even in areas with humans inches away. I felt like I was in an undersea remake of Hitchcock’s Birds and any moment I was going to be bait (and there were no phone booths around in which to hide). Then, I was amazed at how I was simultaneously part of and not part of this new world I was floating over. I must’ve snorkeled for an hour straight without pulling my head up. It was unbelievable and I got to share it with my wife and kids who’d never snorkeled before either.

After this wonderful family vacation, I can’t tell you how relaxed I am. At 9:37am, I think I’m ready for my afternoon siesta… : )

The Avalon experiments keep on happening. This time, check out Avalon Chess!

I’ve long held the belief that the big deal about Avalon is that it provided a platform for a whole new class of data visualization and manipulation software, stuff that most of us can’t even dream of right now. But Edward Tufte can dream of it and in one of his dreams, he invented Sparklines, a very nice way to integrate graphics directly into a sentence instead of relegating it to a whole other paragraph.

As evidence of the power of Avalon to enable the next-gen UI, Sean Gerety has provided an Avalon implementation of Sparklines. Excellent work, Sean.

Read Rod Paddock’s Adventures in Avalon as he installs and binds to a DataSet:

• Avalon Adventures Part 0 : The Setup
• Avalon Adventures Part 1 : Data Access
• Avalon Adventures Part 2 : Basic Data Binding
• Avalon Adventures Part 3: Lists With Style
• Avalon Adventures Part 4: An Event to Remember
• Avalon Adventures Part 5: The Conversion
• Avalon Adventures Summary: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Because Ian doesn’t have blog comments and because the Avalon Animation team doesn’t yet have a blog, Elizabeth Nelson (PM) and Matt Calkins (SDE) have asked that I post the following response to Ian’s recent Animating Custom Types in Avalon post:

“I’m happy to report that building custom animations to animate font size is not necessary. (Nevertheless, Ian Griffiths’s sample is a spiffy example of how to build custom animations!) For the time being, TextEffects provides just the font size animation tools he seeks. There’s even a TextEffects sample in the Avalon CTP Announcement that Arik, Karsten and Tim put together. The properties of interest for font size animations are ScaleX and ScaleY.

“This isn’t the end of the story on Font animations — we’re still working on hooking a few things up internally to make it easier to use animations. Regardless of what else we cook up for built-in Font animations, TextEffects will come in handy for animating individual characters in a string in a coordinated manner.

“As for the concern about rendering artifacts when enlarging text, the issue is definitely on our radar!

“Thanks for your enthusiasm for custom animations.”

Most of the worst experiences of my childhood involve the dentist. I have an active gag reflex and a general aversion to sitting still for long periods with nothing to do but let somebody poke my soft innards with a metal stick, so the dentist chair has never been a good fit for me. Today, I got another reason to hate the dentist.

Because Beaverton does not fluoridate their water and because he’s a nine-year old boy, my youngest son Tom had 4 cavities to deal with today. He was nonchalant about the whole thing for the first hour alone in the chair while I waiting in the sitting room, never expressing concern or doubt about the experience to come, which made me believe that everything was going to be just fine. Even when he started crying a bit, I was able to maintain my seat, knowing that he leaned toward the dramatic. However, when he started screaming, that’s when all 6′5″ and 280 pounds of me barged through the door between the waiting area and the rending rooms, not stopping to ask the women milling around reception if that was OK and conscious but uncaring that the expression on my face stilled them to silence.

When I got back to the room where Tom was being impaled, the dentist was busy telling him that little girls cried less than he did. She further went on to tell him that he wasn’t feeling “pain” at all but only “pressure,” a sentiment she had to repeat several times while she asked the nurse to give her the extra gauze to staunch the profuse bleeding. I have to say that it was difficult to simultaneously comfort my son while expressing my displeasure at the dentist for both the potential physical and verified mental torture she was using on him. Probably it wasn’t easy for her to concentrate on her dentistry in a completely focused manner while I loomed over her, but that’s what you get for making my son cry for 30 minutes.

Anyway, at the end, as she informed me that she worked with children all the time and had two of her own (implying that the pain was somehow my son’s fault, I’m guessing), she also reached for the referral pad for another dentist to fill the other two cavities, saving me the trouble of asking.

I hate the dentist.

P.S. After a McDonald’s toy and chicken sandwich (eaten carefully from the un-decimated side of his mouth), Tom seems unaffected. However, I’m sure that the whole sordid experience will come roaring back to him in the future unless they’ve replaced the dentist with nanites and computer programs (or sledge hammers and chisels, which would be equally humane)…