I’ve participated in two sand sculpting endeavors (Mount St. Michel and The Sphinx), and highly recommend them as a creative and fun group activity. All you need is a beach (or lots of sand), a few people, and some basic tools. It’s not that hard to make something amazing! Sand Castle Central has tips, contest listings, photos, and a directory of sand castle instructors (there’s a new career in there somewhere).

This eWeek review of the new Palm m100 says: “The most compelling new feature of the m100 is its plastic digitizer, which is less prone to breakage than the glass digitizers in other Palm devices.” Hmmm. Other than that, it isn’t as appealing to me as the higher end models.

Pottery Barn has finally opened up online. I prefer actually going to PB for the tactile experience, but having a catalog online does facilitate linking to household accessories that I can then yak endlessly about. Take these “glass wax” candles, for instance. They are completely transparent (except for the wick) and have an amazing glow when lit. And unlike those gel wax candles, they aren’t almost liquid and goopy, instead they are actually pretty hard like normal wax candles. I bought one (it was on sale), but when I got it home, it stank up the place. I’m not sure what to do with it (I am terrible at throwing things out) but the smell makes me unhappy and sneezy, so right now I have it underneath an overturned vase. So, unless they’ve reformulated them (perhaps that’s why they were on sale), be aware that “lightly scented” is an understatement.

Weddings are a good opportunity to see all your Silicon Valley friends in clothing and accessories without company logos on them.

MAC Cosmetics has finally launched their online store. It’s a bit too “multimedia” and flashy for me. It’s never fun buying nail polish online because it is impossible to get a true idea of how the colors and finishes will actually look.

My cell phone service provider is GTE Wireless, which is now Verizon Wireless. GTE merged with Bell Atlantic into Verizon and created a formidable nationwide communications company. Back east, I had seen James Earl Jones doing Bell Atlantic commercials (ohhhh that voice!) and he’s now doing the Verizon ones, but I haven’t seen them nationwide yet. I’ve seen other commercials with people making two-finger “V” symbols. However, according to the press release about their ads “James Earl Jones, who served as the spokesperson for Bell Atlantic, will greet callers to Verizon’s national directory assistance.” I can just hear it: “Luke! Call your father.”

My brother uses the Pelikan Level I fountain pen, which he especially likes because it has a large ink capacity and he writes pages and pages of stuff at work. There’s a review of it on Penoply which surmises that it’s Pelikan’s way of getting fountain pens into the hands of teens and gen-exers. It’s a plastic fountain pen with a steel nib so I was skeptical until I wrote with it. It’s smooth smooth smooth. Nice. To refill the ink, you dock it to a special bottle. So, if you’re a fountain pen snob but don’t like to carry a snobby fountain pen all the time, you can give this one a whirl. But if you think the docking refill system is cool and want a high-end model, they also have the Level 5 series. But for some reason they couldn’t design the cap to fit back on the top for the Level 5s, which is a big minus.

Can’t remember when or where I found this, but if you need to find out what a plane looks like, airliners.net probably has a photo of it.

I traveled with my PalmPilot out of its case and the screen cracked. Ouch. I should know better; I really should. But it’s an old model anyway, so I was already thinking of getting a new one. But I’m undecided about which model to get. And they’ll keep making more, so this may turn into the old “I’m going to wait until they add nifty feature TLA” before I buy a new one.

Somehow this seems a little…contrived. It’s a ZDNet article about programmer’s block which is actually based on a Slashdot thread. I suppose I shouldn’t be critical; it’s an interesting topic and Slashdot is as good a source as any for news stories. The whole Web thing is based on links and sharing information anyway. But I guess I wish more news sites would come up with their own creative story ideas. In this case, though, the mainstream readers don’t read Slashdot, so I suppose it is a way to introduce their readers to something interesting in the programmer world. Wired News thought the ZDNet article was interesting enough to link to in their “Elsewhere Today” section. Ah well, I’m just another jaded programmer :-). Programmer’s block doesn’t fascinate me, it is just a fact of life and I keep my life balanced to avoid it.