Ironically, one reason that I have been so hesitant to upgrade to Vista or Windows 7 is that my transition from Windows 98 to Windows XP was so traumatic.  (OMG, I sound like an abuse victim on Dr. Phil.)

Anyway, one thing that has always irritated the sh*t out of me is the “All Programs” menu that you get when you click on the XP “Start” button.

If you love software as much as I do (especially free demos), your “All Programs” menu is chock-full of mysterious menu items arranged in a random, non-alphabetized mess.  More than once I’ve started to download software only to find out that it was already installed on my PC.

And for 8 long years, I’ve assumed that there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

But today is a new day!

Just open up the All Programs menus, and right-click on any menu item.  Near the bottom of the drop-down menu, you’ll see the magic words “Sort by Name.”  Give that baby a click, and all of a sudden, everything is in alphabetical order.

Yep.  8 long years…

Here are some more tips:

1. You can rename any item on the All Programs menu by right-clicking it.
2. Specifically, if there are any items that you want at the top of the list, you can add an initial zero or two to the name of the item to get it to come first in the alphabet.  (Some folder names shouldn’t be changed.  Don’t rename “Startup.”  Also, pay attention to any warnings that pop up — it’s XP trying to stop you from doing something stupid.)
3. You might also want to rename any items with non-intuitive or downright baffling names.
4. If you want to go to the folder containing the items on the All Programs menu, you can right-click on the All Programs button and then click on “Explore.”  (The items on the All Programs list should be located in the folder containing your profile in a sub-folder named “Start Menu\Programs.”)
5. Actually, clicking on “Explore” will only show you the menu items associated with the profile you logged in with.  If you can’t find what you’re looking for in that folder, try right-clicking on All Programs and then clicking on “Explore All Users.”
6. One reason that you might want to go into the Start Menu\Programs folder(s) is to create groups and subgroups of menu items — you can create new folders, name them whatever you want, and then drag (or cut-and-paste) menu items to your heart’s delight.
7. If there’s a menu item that belongs in more than one group or subgroup, you can make as many copies of that item as you need.
8. You may find one or more All Programs menu items consisting of a folder containing a single folder or shortcut.  You can chop out a layer of the hierarchy by dragging, moving, or cutting and pasting the single lower-level item up into the “Start Menu\Programs” folder, and then deleting the original folder (which should now be empty).
9. If you want, you can move individual menu items from one profile to another.
10. Finally, the All Programs list includes both shortcuts and folders containing shortcuts.  After you alphabetize the list, the folders and the shortcuts will be alphabetized into two separate groups.  If that bothers you, you can move each shortcut you care about into its own appropriately named new folder.

Before you get too creative, especially with Tips 6-10, I urge you to make a backup copy of any “Start Menu\Programs” folder that you want to make changes to.  (But you knew that already, didn’t you?)

Good luck!

I’m a benefactor of this rule — my parents had not yet completed the naturalization process when I was born in New York City all those years ago.  But thanks to the Fourteenth Amendment, I was a US citizen from Day One.

Lately, there has been talk of changing the Fourteenth Amendment to get rid of birthright citizenship.  Those in favor of the change paint a dark picture of pregnant women from foreign countries making their way onto American soil for the express purpose of hitting the citizenship jackpot.

Here’s why I’m against changing the law:

1. Birthright citizenship has been a huge success story.  It has contributed significantly to America’s spectacular growth over the past 100+ years, by greatly accelerating the assimilation of immigrants and their children into American society.
2. Birthright citizenship is easy to understand and apply.  If you can prove that you were born in the US, you’re a US citizen.  End of story.
3. The correlative of No. 2 is that doing away with birthright citizenship would be an administrative nightmare (and a bureaucrat’s paradise).  Imagine the tons of paperwork and lawyers’ fees that would be generated if everyone had to prove that their parents were US citizens.
4. Any change in the law would unfairly affect people of color.  When’s the last time that you heard anyone questioning the citizenship of a white person?
5. In fact, even under current law, there have been numerous incidents of US citizens (invariably non-white) being wrongly deported.  Changing the law would vastly increase the ability of the government to mess with people’s lives.
6. Are pregnant foreigners coming into the US to drop “anchor babies”?  Possibly.  But nowhere near as many as the anti-BC crowd would have you believe.  And certainly nowhere near enough to justify a nuclear change in policy.

There’s an Asian American angle to the story.  Back in the 1890′s, a San Francisco resident named Wong Kim Ark, born in the US to Chinese parents, went to visit China.  When he came back to the US, the authorities wouldn’t let him into the country because, in their view, Mr. Wong was “a subject of the emperor of China,” and not a US citizen.

One of the truly great things about America is that even a cook can have his day in the highest court in the land:

United States v. Wong Kim Ark

The Fourteenth Amendment rocks!

Lt. Dan Choi, West Point graduate, Iraq veteran (infantry), and son of a Korean American Southern Baptist minister, had the courage to tell the world that he’s gay — even though he knew that it might cost him his career and his relationship with his father.

Well, it did end up costing him his career, at least for the time being — the Army has just discharged him pursuant to the infamous Don’t Ask Don’t Tell (DADT) policy.

As for Lt. Choi’s relationship with his father — time will tell.  (FWIW, seeing how he has conducted himself throughout his ordeal, I for one would be damned proud if he were my son.)

Here is Lt. Choi, being interviewed by Rachel Maddow:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

“You can’t teach standup comedy. If you could, you would see a lot more Asians doing it.”

This quote is from the super-awesome Emo Philips, who I worked with 20+ years ago in Chicago, when he was using his real name, Phil Soltanec.

A written quote is an incredibly lame substitute for seeing Emo in person, but here’s an example of his material:

“When I was a kid, I used to pray every night for a new bike. Then I realized, the Lord doesn’t work that way. So I just stole one and asked Him to forgive me … and I got it!”

Here’s an excerpt from a show that Emo did several years ago at the Hasty Pudding:

I saw an Asian American woman in her 20s or so wearing a T-shirt with this on the front:

Pinyin:  bai ren kan bu dong
English:  White People Can’t Read This

At first, I was a little taken aback.  Was this some kind of racist put-down of white people?  Were there white people in the crowd who in fact could read the t-shirt?

Lord knows that there are probably millions of Asian people in the world who are on some kind of Asian Superiority trip.  But I’m not sure this is an example of anti-white-ism.

If you’ve ever been to Asia, you’ve undoubtedly seen young people wearing T-shirts with inappropriate, if not downright bizarre, Western phrases on them.  My wife tells me that when she visited Taiwan, she saw one upscale-looking woman walking down the street wearing a T-shirt that read:  If you want me, buy me. In Seoul I saw a woman wearing a shirt that read:  Voulez-vous le phoque? (Literally, French for Do you want the seal? But of course the word “phoque” sounds an awful lot like a certain English word.)

And in America, some white people have been known to use random Chinese characters as a fashion statement.  (Whenever I see a white person with a tattoo of a Chinese character, I fight the urge to tell them that it’s upside down.)

Plus, there’s that Woody Harrelson movie White Guys Can’t Jump.

So if you put it all together, you can look at the bai ren kan bu dong T-shirt as a deep joke about cultural appropriation and fashion.

The more I thought about it, the funnier it got.

So here’s my bottom line:

1. Sure, you can argue that the T-shirt is racist.  But I’m willing to give the designer the benefit of the doubt.
2. The T-shirt is probably funnier if a white person wears it.
3. If you wear the T-shirt in public long enough, you’re bound to run into a white person who isn’t going to get the joke, and who is going to be offended.
4. It’s going to be next to impossible to explain the joke to an offended white person.
5. But on the other hand, how many times has a white person tried to explain to me how I shouldn’t be offended by one of their jokes?  (Does the name Sarah Silverman ring a bell?)

You can buy the T-shirt at the Post-JDM Productions site.

You’ve seen the ads — settle your credit card debt without filing bankruptcy!  Yay!

The first thing you should know about debt settlement is that it really is possible, under certain circumstances, to get your credit card company to accept less than you owe in full settlement of your debt.

That’s 100% true.

But hiring a debt settlement company to get you there?  You might want to consider:

1. Most, if not all, debt settlement companies charge a hefty fee up front, which they keep regardless of whether your debt gets reduced.
2. In fact, a depressingly low percentage of customers get their debt reduced.  An awful lot of customers end up filing for bankruptcy.
3. Assuming you get a settlement, it goes on your credit record.
4. Also, under certain circumstances, a settlement might result in taxable income to you.
5. Working with a debt settlement company usually, if not always, involves paying money into a third-party account — money that you would ordinarily be paying to the credit card company.
6. That means that, until you actually reach a settlement with your credit card company, your credit card company is likely to try to collect from you — with phone calls, letters, and even lawsuits.
7. Much, if not all, of the “service” provided to you by a debt settlement company is stuff that you might well be able to do yourself.

It is possible that there is an honest debt settlement company out there, I suppose.  I just haven’t ever heard of one.

I did an internet search for “reputable debt settlement company.”  I found one company that claimed to have a spotless reputation for honesty.  But when I searched for that company’s name on the internet, I wasn’t able to find one single non-suspicious web site supporting the company’s claim.

To paraphrase Sam Malone from Cheers: “Not that many people know this, but we’ve got a great reputation!”

Check out the article in today’s New York Times:

Link to Article

Mr. Lu subsequently reconciled with his wife, leading to what has to have been the Mother of All Awkward Conversations:

“Mommy’s home!  Come here, little precious!  Little precious?”

“Honey, I’ve got good news and bad news.  The good news is that I was finally able to make a down payment on that backhoe I’ve had my eye on…”

In a breathtakingly brazen attempt to get his son back, Mr. Lu contacted the police and accused the Beijing couple of child trafficking.

After the smoke cleared, Mr. Lu was convicted of child abandonment, receiving a 6-month suspended sentence and 1-year probation.

The Beijing couple was found to have done nothing wrong.  However, the 18000 RMB (approx. $2,600) that the couple paid for the child was “confiscated” by the authorities.

Link to Article

Me:   “We have to take a break.  We’ve been playing Zelda for 3 hours!”

DD:  “But my eyes aren’t even hurting yet!”

Here’s the situation — you’re working with a long document (20, 50, 100 pages, whatever).  You want to chop off the last 10+ pages.  So you move the cursor to the cutting point, click on it, and then laboriously scroll through the pages to be deleted while holding down the left mouse button.  Then, when you get to the end, you hope that everything is still highlighted as you hit the Delete key.  But more often than not, your finger slips somewhere or other, and you have to spend a couple of really annoying minutes trying to figure out if you’ve deleted exactly what you wanted to…

Never again!

Shift-Ctrl-End

will highlight everything from the current cursor location to the end of the document.

Shift-Ctrl-Home

will highlight everything from the current cursor location to the beginning of the document.

Unbelievable!

Time for a doughnut.

FOB stands for “Fresh Off the Boat,” and is used to refer to a person from Asia who has recently arrived in America. More often than not, the term is used pejoratively to describe Asian men, particularly teenagers and young adults. (It’s also the name of a play by Asian American playwright David Henry Hwang.)

By and large, Asian Americans can be pretty harsh on FOBs. I’m no psychologist, but it seems to me that it’s an example of sh*t flowing downhill.

Growing up as an Asian American can be tough at times. You take an awful lot of grief from mean non-Asian people in your life, not to mention the grief you take from your own family. All that ill feeling has to get channeled somewhere.  What better target than Long Duk Dong?

In case you’re not a fan of director John Hughes, Long Duk Dong (played by Utah-born Gedde Watanabe) is an Asian foreign exchange student in the film Sixteen Candles who attempts to provide some comic relief as Molly Ringwald strives mightily to survive the indignity of being ignored by her family on her 16th birthday:

Long Duk Dong is FOB.  He talks funny, he dresses funny, and he has funny hair.  He’s childlike, giggly, and socially inept.  Early on in the film, he latches onto a crude phrase used to describe female anatomy, which he delightedly lets fly at the screenwriter’s whim.  (To his dubious credit, Long Duk Dong manages to lose his virginity by the end of the movie, in what has to be the least erotic sex scene ever filmed.)

Here’s the thing — when you grow up as an Asian American male, you convince yourself that there’s no way anyone would ever confuse you with Long Duk Dong.  You speak perfect English.  You have better clothes and better hair (at least some of the time).  You take pains to avoid acting in a childlike or giggly manner.

Yep, there’s no way anyone would think you were FOB.

Yet, deep down, I know that an awful lot of people in America just don’t see that much of a difference between me and Long Duk Dong.

And if I were living in Arizona, that would scare the crap out of me.

(By the way, I don’t want anyone to think I’m down on Gedde Watanabe for taking the role.  There just isn’t that much work for Asian American actors.  IMHO, he did the best he could with the script that he was given.  Gedde went onto better things, including leading roles in the films Volunteers and Gung Ho.)