On occasion I am asked what it takes to move to the United States if you are not a US citizen. Coincidentally, I was recently pointed to a 2008 issue of The Reason, which has a flow chart illustrating just how complicated legal immigration to the US is:

(click the image for a full-size PDF version)

Now, the flow chart somewhat presumptuously implies that every immigrant to any country wants to become a citizen of that very country, which I have found to be untrue — some of my family’s best friends have lived in Germany for decades and have no intention to give up the citizenship they were born with. But the chart still gives a helpful overview of just how hard it is to indeed go down that road if you wanted to. What might surprise some people is that US immigration law is among the strictest in the western world — somewhat ironic, given its traditional status as an immigrant country.

Another thing that has caused confusion before: Just because you marry a US citizen, you don’t automatically earn a residence permit (let alone citizenship) without any further ado. It makes it easier to achieve both of these things, but a US citizen’s spouse still has to file a bunch of paperwork (and bring time and patience) to receive the necessary papers to enter the country.

Thanks for the link, Jabba!

Last week, I secretly released version 1.2 of my Copy ShortURL add-on. It contains a lot of improvements based on your feedback! Here’s the 411 on the new features and how to use them:

is.gd is the new default
I switched to is.gd (from tinyurl) as the default shortening service. I am affiliated with neither of them, but I though the point of short URLs is, well, being short. So is.gd wins on that front. If you don’t like that, don’t fret, because…:

You can pick your own short URL service now
If you have a short URL service that you like more than the default, you can pick your own now. Instructions are in the README file on github (towards the bottom). By setting the preference extensions.copyshorturl.serviceURL in about:config, you can for example use tinyurl, bit.ly (requires an API key) and lots of other URL shorteners. If you have additional service URLs to share with the class, please leave a comment!

Notifications
Initially, there was no way to tell if the add-on had already done its job, except for checking your clipboard contents (hint, if in doubt, yes, it worked). So I added unobtrusive Growl notifications for platforms that support it. For example:

If you don’t have Growl, a Firefox notification bar is shown instead:

Finally, Copy ShortURL is now compatible with Firefox versions 3.6 to 4.0b5pre.

Hope you like it, and feel free to leave a comment here or file issues on github if anything is not working as expected.