estirose

Eh. Most of this is going to be LJ-cut.

Mom and I went to the mall today to look at computers and other things. Or at least, *computer*; we stopped at the Apple store to check out the Mac Mini. It's a nice machine, though not quite as gorgeous as pictures of it were. Mom doesn't think she would have a problem adjusting to the OS, but we're seeing what programs she'd have to port over. Most likely she'd lose some of her mapping software and Family Tree Maker, since the tax software and word processing software she can get equivalents to on the Mac. (I also checked out 10.4 and the iPod Photo. Nice stuff, but I'm not sold on buying either.) Oh, and mom says that the Mini is quite heavy. I'll have to look on the website and see how the weight compares to the Cube.

After hitting the Apple store, Mom got a planner and we stopped at Barnes and Noble. Thankfully, I hadn't brought money, for there were quite a few things I wanted to get. One of the books that they had there was understanding Japanese through Manga. Mom also showed me a calligraphy brush and calligraphy set. I looked at them, but for the moment, I'll stick with my fude-brush pens. ("Selma", "elegant", and "kanji" do not belong in the same sentence.)

We had lunch at the Cheesecake factory nearby. We went at a good time, and so we were able to get a nice outside table. (Which would have been better if our view wasn't of the traffic on the two major streets nearby.) Both of us had a terrible time deciding what we wanted. I think either the menu had changed since I was at the Cheesecake Factory last year in SF with

sugarplum7, or our menu was different. Mom ultimately had an omelet and I had eggs. We even had room for a very delicious cheesecake.

Before Mom and I went out, I tested out a program called PDFPen. It allows you to annotate and so on PDFs, at 3/4 to 1/2 the price of Adobe Acrobat (3/4 if you just want to clip PDFs to a new PDF, 1/2 if you want to create new ones). It has a few problems (it doesn't do auto-calculate like Adobe does, at least in the version I tested, so you'd want to do that in Acrobat/Acrobat Reader, or at least bring your own calculator), but it otherwise seems cool. The program itself is a Mac OS X program, though I ran across plenty in Windows looking for a Mac version.

Last but not least, the original Selma's Ramblings blog has been revamped to serve as an update site for Rosegarden and Inkwell (Inkwell has its own feed, but it's not useful.) If for some bizarre reason you want updates, you can pick up the syndicated feed at