Comp USA stores are selling Rex dinosaur pets from Expert Software Inc. (Coral Gables, FL). The $14.99 CD ROM lets you have up to five dinosaurs roaming the deserts, jungles, caves, and forests of your PC, with typical life spans of 20 days. [Heather Green, BW, 23Feb98, p. 110R.]

American Science & Surplus offers some really weird merchandise, such as genuine burlap coffee sacks from Colombia. Lots of science experiment stuff. . [Bill Park , 12Feb98.]

PC software called The Brain lets you create a "thought" icon and then link other thoughts, memos, contacts, documents, websites, or email messages to it. It's a $49.95 downloadable program from Natrificial Software Technologies (Santa Monica, CA), a company co-founded by 23-year-old programmer Harlan Hugh. [Steve Hamm, BW, 23Feb98, p. 110R.]

(The Brain uses thoughts instead of files and folders, with all of your information automatically indexed by name, date, and type of information. Any thought may have more than one parent, and containment or association is non-spatial. All links are bidirectional, and navigation is separate from document content (unlike hypertext links). A "jump" relationship lets items be associated with each other without being associated with other items in the group. Link display is dynamic, and is claimed to be easier to use than a hierarchy. Plus you can link in anything on your network or the Web, just by drawing a line from one window to another. "It's actually a lot of fun." See and , or for an independent review. Screenshots and animations can be seen at . [Harlan Hugh , comp.ai, 25Feb98. David Joslin.])

-- Ken