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[Update: I've posted a few photos from the concert. Also, my review.]

15 months ago, Nickel Creek announced they were breaking up for an indefinite period after a year-long “farewell (for now) tour.” Tonight is the last stop on that tour. I’ll be there and will probably post some thoughts late tonight or in the morning. On the website, NPR.org/music, you can watch and listen to the recent Washington D.C. stop on the tour.

I’ve long felt a bitter-sweet anticipation about this concert. This young group — they’re still very, very young — has bridged generations in my household. For different reasons, each person in my family is a fan of the individuals who make up the group, and the group itself. Lots of nostalgia.

Here’s something to make some of you feel very old: It was 31 years ago (almost to the day) that the rock group known as The Band performed their last concert at the Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. (Later, the group reformed and performed for several years without Robbie Robertson.) Martin Scorsese’s documentary of that concert, The Last Waltz, is considered (by some, at least) to be the greatest rock concert movie ever made.

Coincidence? Nickel Creek recorded a song called First and Last Waltz on their album, Why Should the First Die?

[Photo: The final exit. More photos here.]

Technorati Tags: music, nashville, nickel creek

Today, CNet’s News.com reports that Yahoo and Adobe are bringing pay-per-click ads to Adobe’s Portable Document Format (so that’s what PDF stands for) so that “publishers can serve up ads inside PDFs distributed on Web sites and over e-mail that are contextually relevant to the content.”

Now flashback to last week when I pointed to this report about a patent granted to Google for “customizing content and advertisements in a publication.”

So, just to make this a little less complicated:

1. In the works, there’s a way to embed “contextually relevant” ads from Yahoo! in a PDF document.

2. Google has a just been granted a patent to do something that sounds — in theory, at least — very similar, and can even be construed to mean that the ads will not only be relevant to editorial context, but can also be relevant to the person receiving the document.

3. While PDFs are perhaps best known by consumers as something they view with a computer, the graphics and printing industries now use a version of the format called PDF/X-1a as a “standard file format specifically designed for the blind exchange of final print-ready pages.” In other words, magazine publishers and printers use a professional form of PDFs to print nearly everything these days.

4. PDFs are eBooks that can be read in eBook readers like the Kindle or the iRex iLiad.

5. Google (while its patent implies there’s something more than just collecting content and mashing-up something to a PDF file, nonetheless, has a pretty impressive model for doing just that with the Google Book Search reader. For example, look at the top, right corner of this public domain version of Edith Wharton’s novel, Summer. See that little link that says “Download PDF 6.1 M?” If you click it, Google will convert the book you can read online into a PDF with which you can print to paper or e-mail to your Kindle or (with a bit of work) some giant printer can throw it on a web press.

6. Despite people like me believing PDFs were on their way out a decade ago, apparently, they are digital cockroaches that will survive in one form or another forever — for both online and offline media.

Technorati Tags: adobe, google, pdf