immigrants, and, being one—both American and immigrant—I thought I’d weigh in on the immigration reform issue that is so hotly debated these days.

But first, a brief rant (did you really expect otherwise?). I was driving in to work earlier this week, and happened to be listening to NPR. The California Report came on, and its subject that day was the apparent “heated debate” over language in the immigration reform package that’s currently making its way through Congress. Some group of well-meaning citizens had taken exception to the usage of the words “illegal” and “alien” to describe, well, illegal aliens. They preferred to use the word “undocumented” instead. After recovering from my attack of outraged speechlessness^*, I determined to rant (er, blog) about it online forthwith.

This is just the kind of crap that, besides being engineered to drive me right up the wall, detracts from the genuine, important issue of immigration reform and mires all the players in useless semantic debates. This, it seems to me, is the surest way to get people to stop taking you seriously—not, as they seem to believe, the contrary. What they should be focusing on are common sense proposals to improve our nation’s obviously lacking immigration policy, not quibbling over terminology. I could continue, but then I’d just get worked up and deviate from my point, which won’t help anybody.

Let me begin by outlining my position on the issue. First, being a legal immigrant to this country, I have what some may consider to be conflicting positions on the issue of illegal immigration (and I don’t care what they say; illegal is the perfect word, seeing as these people are breaking the law). The first, as you might suspect, is that I sympathize with those longing to escape oppression or crippling poverty or even lack of opportunity for the chance to live the American Dream (or at least to survive or live moderately well in exchange for hard work).

But the second is that I take a very dim view of trying to do so illegally. Illegal immigrants (and the government’s knee-jerk reaction to dealing with the problem) make everything harder for those who want to come here legitimately. The surge in illegal immigration in the past couple of decades, and, of course, the ubiquitous effects of 9/11, have ensured that those who want to come here legally (even on a travel visa!) have to jump through endless hoops, with no guarantee of success. Why is it that the people who bother to try and do things right are penalized? This is much like my rant on how people who buy their movies and music legally are the ones that have to suffer through the unavoidable don’t-pirate rants from the RIAA and MPAA. The good guys really do finish last.

So what can we do about this? Well, first, we need to tighten our borders. Make it harder for illegals to get in, because once they have, it’s really hard, if not impossible, to get them out again. Part of that is making the punishments for sneaking in—and getting caught—much more severe. That, though I have no evidence to back up the assertion, would be a much more effective deterrent than the half-hearted policy we have now. I had brief designs of pointing to the extremely low rates of DUI offenses in Europe and justifying them by indicating the draconian punishments for doing so, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader.

Secondly, we need to make it easier for those who want to come in legitimately to do so. The current, tortuous immigration process is beset by crippling bureaucracy and appalling inefficiency (a hallmark of any government institution, you might say); anyone who has ever stood in a line at an INS office will know what I’m talking about. They are, at best, completely uninterested in making things easy (or just easier) for wannabe American residents/citizens, and at worst, are active hindrances to our lives and goals. Which, as you might imagine, is an encouragement for those who want to want to avoid all the rigamarole of trying to get in legally.

This can all be summed up by the following: don’t punish the good guy. I know this is a radical proposal, but how about we try to reward those who try to obey the law, and punish those who don’t?

^* And really, you’d think I’d be inured to such idiocy by now, but I am continually shocked and awed. Only in California, man.

Draggable tabs. This wish is a direct effect of my OCD, but that makes it no less valid. I’d like to be able to drag tabs to reorder them for quicker keyboard navigation and more efficient workflow. Anybody second the motion?

let me count the ways. And by “thee,” I mean Adobe Acrobat for Mac. This software is, to put it diplomatically, a piece of crap. Really. Let me illustrate: I would anticipate that most of the time, what most people want to convert to PDF is a Microsoft Office document. Right? So you would think that Adobe would spend some time on, oh, I don’t know, getting it to work. But you’d be wrong.

In Acrobat 7.0.7 (the latest and by no means greatest version) for Mac, there’s a separate program to convert Microsoft Office documents to PDF, called PDFMaker, that is not governed or governable by the regular Acrobat program. Moreover, there is no way to change PDFMaker settings; you can’t get to them from either Acrobat or MS Office applications.

For example, you can’t tell it to make bookmarks for chapter markers or certain heading types in your MS Word documents. Which would be kind of useful when you’ve got a 100+ page technical document you’re trying to make into PDF.

If you’ve got a document where you have some landscape pages amongst portrait pages, you’re in for a whole another world of hurt. Now if you print this mixed-orientation document to PDF from Apple’s built-in print-to-PDF functionality, what the OS will do is create multiple files, one for each separate portrait or landscape section, which then you can then join together by using Acrobat’s make-PDF-from-multiple-files functionality. But if you try to make a PDF from Word using the Acrobat toolbar (more on this wonderful feature later) that gets added to all MS Office applications, while it does the same making multiple files thing, it names them all the same thing, so what ends up happening is that each new section that gets printed to a separate file overwrites the one that was printed before, and this is the default setting. What you end up with is one file with the last section of your document, but nothing else. And here’s the kicker; I can’t figure out a way to get it to make separate files. I can’t find where in the settings you change that. And even if I could, all I could tell it to do would be to prompt me for a filename for each separate section. It wouldn’t automatically name them with sequential numbers, as the Apple print-to-PDF feature does.

I know what you’re thinking: well, just look at the help, dummy. Not so simple, bub. The Acrobat help is, typically, unhelpful. Because it’s got information on the PDFMaker settings dialog box that is only available on the Windows version of Acrobat. Not a word about the Mac version.

Now let’s talk about the Acrobat toolbar that gets added to MS Office applications at launch. The toolbar in question contains precisely two buttons, so ideally, you want to move those two buttons to the end of one of the other toolbars so it doesn’t take up a whole extra line of vertical space. Problem is, no matter how many times you move the Acrobat toolbar to the end of one of the existing toolbars, the setting is never remembered and it shows up, left-aligned, on a line all by itself every time you launch an MS Office application. The only way to get around this is to keep the Acrobat toolbar aligned on the left, and move one of the Office toolbars to the right of it, because the Office app, at least, will remember the position of the toolbars upon application exit.

So say I want to make a PDF of a technical document that contains multiple sections with both portrait- and landscape-oriented pages. I’m obviously not going to use PDFMaker, because it is completely useless to me. What I do use is Apple’s built-in print-to-PDF feature, which will make separate, sequentially numbered documents for me automatically. Then I go into Acrobat and consolidate all the separate files into one enormous one. And then I run the Reduce File Size macro, to make the file not so enormous. And when I’m done, I end up with a file that has no section bookmarks that is still over twice the size of the one PDFMaker for Windows would make from the same document. PDFMaker for Windows, moreover, wouldn’t need to make separate files for each separate portrait or landscape section.

And every time I have to go through this rigamarole, I think: I paid for this? I want my money back! Something is seriously wrong when other companies write better software to make a product than the inventor of the product.

FreshArrival, you might have seen my post there some time ago about Adrian Holovaty’s gypsy jazz-style recording of the Super Mario Bros. 2 level 1 theme song. In response, an FA reader later sent in a link to this performance by German guitar prodigy Joscho Stephan in the same style:

The first thing about Joscho that strikes the listener is the incredible cleanliness of his fingering execution. No matter how fast and intricate, no technical demands seem to ruffle this monster chopster in the least.

They’re right: this kid (he’s only 21) is amazing.

never met a publicity stunt he didn’t like, but his latest start is one I can get behind: providing free city-wide wi-fi access. According to an article in last Thursday’s San Francisco Chronicle, the city has chosen Google and Earthlink as the best candidates to complete the job:

Google Inc.’s bid to blanket San Francisco with a free wireless Internet service cleared a major hurdle when a city panel identified the Internet search engine leader and EarthLink Inc. as the best candidates to complete the ambitious project.

The recommendation Wednesday, completing a six-week review, clears the way for the city to begin final negotiations with Google and EarthLink, which decided to team together earlier this year after initially bidding against each other. The companies will pay to build the entire network, which is expected to cost at least $15 million.

EarthLink envisions charging roughly $20 per month for the ability to surf the Web at speeds four to five times faster than Google’s free service, expected to be financed with a heavy dose of ads.

Either way, the wireless, or Wi-Fi service, would be faster than Internet access over a dial-up modem. The Google component of the service would make San Francisco the largest city in the nation with free Internet access throughout its borders.

Here’s hoping that they can make it happen, and that a success here will set off a string of like successes elsewhere in the country.

According to this Wired News article, Austin-based Pluck Corporation is launching a for-pay blog syndication service with an editorial staff, with the aim of getting the resulting vetted blog content onto news sites:

A syndication service that delivers commentary from 600 bloggers for use by newspaper publishers is set to launch on Tuesday, further blurring the lines that divide blogs and mainstream media.

BlogBurst, as the service from blog technology company Pluck Corp. is known, includes headlines and articles for use by newspaper publishers in the news or feature sections of their online services, as well as print editions.

Pluck initially has signed up Gannett Co., Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Austin American-Statesman and San Antonio Express. Eventually, the Austin, Texas-based company will offer BlogBurst editorial materials to niche business and overseas publications.

Newspapers are looking to BlogBurst to provide expert blog commentary on travel, women’s issues, technology, food, entertainment and local stories, areas where publishers may not have dedicated staff, said Pluck’s chief executive, Dave Panos.

In return, a select group of popular bloggers are offered wider distribution for their writings, he said. The online syndicate drives traffic to blog sites, allowing featured bloggers to make money from resulting online advertising fees.

As Jeff Jarvis says later on in the article, the feasibility of a for-pay syndication service has yet to be determined, but the fact that newspapers are willing to feature (independent and generally unbiased) blog content at all is a step in the right direction, and a refreshing change from the knee-jerk reaction we’ve been seeing from many in the MSM towards blogs and bloggers.

According to this:

Google has snapped up the rights to an advanced text search algorithm invented by a University of NSW student.

The algorithm, or search engine tool, is called Orion and was developed by UNSW PhD student Ori Allon at the university’s School of Computer Science.

Orion works as an add-on to existing search engines to improve the relevance of searches and won praise from Microsoft founder Bill Gates last year.

[...]

Orion finds pages where the content is about a topic strongly related to the key word. It then returns a section of the page, and lists other topics related to the key word so the user can pick the most relevant.

The results of the query are displayed immediately in the form of expanded text extracts, giving the searcher the relevant information without having to go to the website – although there is still that option.

This is pretty cool, and could have significant impact on streamlining web searches. (Via Slashdot)

there’s a stretch of highway 101 that runs right along the bay. Near the south end of that stretch, just before the highway veers further inland, there’s a small jut of land packed with office buildings and their attendant bright neon signs. On a clear night, the reflected light from the buildings in the waters of the bay is simply beautiful—as many times as I make late-night drives back home from the city, I never grow tired of it. But if you’re so fortunate to be driving when the moon is out and bright, the streak of brilliant, broken moonlight on the water, racing you on a parallel path before it’s forced to disappear at the shore when you turn inland, is one of the loveliest things you’ll ever see. But not one you’ll see mentioned in any guidebook. It makes the whole rest of the frankly ugly drive down 101 worth it.

U.S. Senators Tom Coburn, M.D. (R-OK) and Barack Obama (D-IL) today announced the introduction of legislation that would publicly disclose all recipients of federal funding and financial assistance. The Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act (S. 2590) will allow taxpayers to see how their money is being spent, Dr. Coburn said.

The federal government awards roughly $300 billion in grants annually to 30,000 different organizations across the United States, according to the General Services Administration. This bill would require the Office of Management and Budget to establish and maintain a single public Web site that lists all entities receiving federal funds, including the name of each entity, the amount of federal funds the entity has received annually by program, and the location of the entity. All federal assistance must be posted within 30 days of such funding being awarded to an organization.

“This public database will provide transparency to federal spending and will provide an important weapon taxpayers can use to hold the government accountable. The database also would help to reduce fraud, abuse and misallocation of federal funds by requiring greater accounting of federal expenditures,” Dr. Coburn said. “Every citizen in this country, after all, should have the right to know what organizations and activities are being funded with their hard-earned tax dollars.”

“At the very least, taxpayers deserve to know where their money is being spent,” Senator Obama said. “This common-sense legislation would shine a bright light on all federal spending to help prevent tax dollars from being wasted. If government spending can’t withstand public scrutiny, then the money shouldn’t be spent.”

Over the past year, the Senate Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management on which Dr. Coburn serves as chairman has uncovered tens of billions of dollars in fraud, abuse and wasteful spending, ranging from expensive leasing schemes to corporate welfare to bloated bureaucracy.

“This database would ensure such spending is better tracked and the public can hold policy makers and government agencies accountable for questionable spending decisions,” Dr. Coburn said. “If enacted, this legislation will finally ensure true accountability and transparency in how the government spends our money, which will hopefully lead to more fiscal responsibility by the federal government.”

Let’s hope this has enough political momentum (and really, it should have more than enough) to get passed quickly. (Via InstaPundit)

but almost every time I’ve gotten sick (read: caught a cold) in the past couple of years, it’s happened overnight. I’m feeling fine one night, but the next morning I wake up to the harbinger of sickness: soreness in my nasal passage that will eventually migrate down to my throat and entrench itself there for a few miserable days.

It’s like these little buggers are waiting for my guard to be down. Anyway. In an attempt to follow the CW (something about fluids), I have drunk so much tea in the past 36 hours that I slosh when I move—and when I move, it’s usually in the direction of a bathroom. And of course, I’m about to go make myself some more tea. I might switch out to some Odwalla TJ (drink of the gods, man), though, for variety and vitamin C.