I'm not a Mathematica user, but I've always enjoyed browsing the Mathematica Stack Exchange, which might be what you're looking for. For example, here someone asks how to generate random snowflakes, and many interesting solutions are provided.
I use Mathematica for most of the programming I do. It makes ordinary programming (file handling, database handling, etc.) much easier (at least for me) than it would otherwise be. I even run nightly backups with a Mathematica script, taking advantage of Mathematica's logical operations.
http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/39361/how-to-...
Edit: here's a more real-life example, peeling labels from jars http://mathematica.stackexchange.com/questions/5676/how-to-p...