Creekside Chatter

This week on A Prairie Home Companion, we're live from The Saint Augustine Amphitheater in St. Augustine, Florida. With special guests, the finest "lawn-scapers" ever to work the East coast, The Nashville Bluegrass Band, and Floridian vocalist, guitarist, and harmonica heavy JJ Grey shares his own brand of southern rock and soul. Also with us, The Royal Academy of Radio Actors: Sue Scott, Tim Russell, and Fred Newman; Rich Dworsky and The Guy's All-Star Shoe Band, vocalist Andra Suchy, and the latest news from Lake Wobegon.

If you don't have tickets to watch it live, you can listen in via Sirius satellite radio or online at www.prairiehome.org. Show starts at 6:00 Eastern Time.

AirPrint was supposed to be as revolutionary as AirPlay, allowing wireless printing to shared printers on a network. That part of the functionality appears to have been pulled at the last minute; multiple sources confirm that AirPrint does not function as was advertised a couple months back, even after applying the 10.6.5 update. Wireless printers with AirPrint functions built-in reportedly do work, but hardly any of those printers have been released yet. Hopefully Apple will sort out its AirPrint problems in a forthcoming update, because as it stands now, AirPrint functions fall far short of what we were promised.

This is very disappointing. I hope they can resolve whatever issues quickly and get AirPrint working like it was advertised.

The holidays are creeping closer, so we’re back today, with another template to transform your family’s favorite recipes into a colorful, beautifully-published recipe book that you can give to your friends and loved-ones this holiday season.

Yesterday I shared a template for using an Adobe InDesign template, which you can read more about here. Today we’re looking at using Microsoft Word to create a quick and easy recipe book.

Not only do they provide the template, they've got complete instructions on how to use it.

Are the Internet and the posting of material online changing expectations? From what I observe of “consumer” attitudes, the answer is yes. Increasingly, Internet users expect these things to be free and freely usable — a phenomenon that seems to have an inverse relationship to the user’s age; increasingly, copyright has only meaning between companies and not between copyright holders and consumers.

The situation is exacerbated, at least in ebook world, by agency pricing and DRM. I suspect that there is less piracy of books that fall closer to the low-price-DRM-free side of the curve than of books that fall closer to the high-price-DRM side of the curve. The situation is also exacerbated by such things as YouTube and Wikipedia, both of which encourage sharing and free use. Consumers become accustomed to free use of intellectual property. There is also the problem of a decline in understanding among the general population of what constitutes intellectual property that is protectable and why it should be protectable. Is there any reason other than corporate greed to keep extending the protection life of Mickey Mouse?

vice.

FRANCE AT LAST! IRON DIVISION DEBARKING

After months of vexatious delays, the Pennsylvania Guardsmen acknowledged their welcome on French soil with expansive smiles which showed their pleasure at having come thus far on the Great Adventure.]

And so the division went to France. The movement to a port of embarkation began in April, 1918, and the convoy carrying the eager soldiers arrived in a French port May 18th. The troops were separated by organizations, brigaded with British troops in training areas and entered upon the final phases of their instruction. The men were discouraged by their exceptionally long period of preparation. They felt within themselves that they were ready for the front line, and the evident hesitation of the military authorities to put them there was distressing. Many of them began to doubt that they would see actual fighting. They had longed and waited for so many months that it is no exaggeration, on the word of men who have returned, to say that their

Today it has been exactly one year since the Fort Hood massacre.

On that day, one of our own - VC commenter Philip Warman - lost his beloved wife Juanita. I wasn't able to write about it for several days, but what I said when I finally did is equally true on this sad anniversary:

America's armed forces are a rough and colorful patchwork composed of urban sophisticates and down home country boys and girls, cynics and romantics. Perhaps nowhere in America do men and women, blacks, whites, hispanics, Jews, gentiles, native born Americans and those with the ink still wet on their citizenship papers so successfully live, work, and bond together. This is, I think, the result of a resounding call to be part of something greater than ourselves. Though it took her away from those she loved so deeply, Juanita Warman heard and responded to that distant trumpet. She stepped up. When her country called, she was right there where America needed her to be.