Personal Dork Assistant

The Spy Who Came In From The Mall

The local media was abuzz with the news of a former senior US State Department guy who may have passed on classified documents to a Taiwanese agent. That wasn't the only thing the dude gave on to the female agent, either.

There, he allegedly met a 33-year-old female Taiwan intelligence agent who had flown from Washington, where she worked for Taiwan's representative office. He spent $570.01 at a Taipei Christian Dior shop, according to the affidavit, and paid a bill at the Grand Formosa Regent Taipei hotel in the amount of $333.19.

That's Chinese girls for ya, shopping for brand-name stuff while defending her country.

The New York Times had their own article, and more interesting than the details of the incident itself was the reaction of fellow State Department folks.

"I don't know of any senior officials who are pro-Taiwan," one former senior State Department official said.

He and others said Foreign Service officers largely viewed some Taiwanese officials' struggle to stay separate from China as a distraction, when the truly important relationship for the United States is China.

Carl W. Ford Jr., an assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research until he retired last year, worked directly with Mr. Keyser. He agreed that few if any State Department officials were openly pro-Taiwan.

Hmm... maybe buying some modern weaponry wouldn't be that bad of an idea after all.

GoDaddyGoDaddyGo

It's that time of the year. Time to renew my domain name registration. Been getting regular reminder emails for months from my domain registrar, so I headed over to the site during lunch hour to do the renewal. Except that the EV1 site didn't allow domain renewals from my IP address for some unknown reason. Well, if they didn't want my business, I was happy to take it elsewhere. So I headed over to GoDaddy and transferred my registrations over to them. It cost a couple of extra bucks, but the transfer went smoothly within a couple of days. And more importantly, I can continue to bring the PersonalDork multimedia experience to my loyal reader(s) without interruption. At least until my freebie 1and1 webhosting deal runs out in a couple of years.

Pod2Tunes

People have been writing hacks for pulling music off the iPod since Day 1. However, they've all been ugly, bloated, or required money. Somebody finally implemented the obvious, allowing you to drag directly from within iTunes to the hard disk. Jumped over to their website right away to download the iTunes plugin. They had a screenshot to demo the program.

Looks like the author is a J-Pop fan. How would I know? Because I also happen to own Utada Hikaru SINGLE COLLECTION VOL.1, and that's the songs being dragged around in the sample picture.

Apparently, the plugin made the copying a little too easy, because Apple sent the dreaded Cease & Desist letter as soon as they got wind of the utility. Of course, in the brave new world of P2P filesharing, you can't really put the genie back into the bottle, but the actual download link is left as an exercise for the reader.

River Runs Through

The cynical among us knew that some folks would have to be sacrificed at the altar of progress for China to raise its overall standard of living. We were okay with that, as long as it was for the greater good of the motherland. And as long as it doesn't affect us, of course. Unfortunately, such plans usually just end up sacrificing lots of poor folks for naught. It's no surprise to anybody that the massive industrial expansion in China has created polluted nightmares all around. When you dump random shit in the water, people get cancer and die. So for destroying livelihoods, lives, and villages, what are we making here? Some high-tech gizmo, or some fancy chemical, perhaps? Well, it's a chemical, but hardly fancy.

One of the biggest polluters is the Lianhua Gourmet Powder Company, China's largest producer of monosodium glutamate, or MSG, the flavor enhancer. But the company's political influence is so vast that environmental regulators who have tried to challenge the company have done so in vain.

So the catastrophic and painful destruction of an entire river valley, just for MSG?

Under any circumstances, the company's sheer size would translate into significant political clout. But Lianhua, basically, is the government. Lianhua is traded on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, but according to the credit analysis, its majority stockholder is a holding company owned by the Xiangcheng city government.

So for the privilege of making a few bucks the government sells out their own people to death and destitution. Nothing like a little petty greed to destroy a Great Social Experiment. At least the Chinese Microsofties still have it good.

It's Like a War Zone

As the American toll in Iraq continues to rise, the troops are struggling to cope with an amorphous and determined enemy. You know it's bad when they start comparing the situation to...

"They were doing battlefield urban operations in four places at one time," said Lt. Col. Albert Maas, operations officer for the 2nd Medical Brigade, which oversees U.S. combat hospitals in Iraq. "It's like working in downtown Detroit. You're going literally building to building."

In other news, leading officials of the Motor City have been captured for possessing weapons of mass destruction.

MTV News

In the first bit of insight I've seen from the Asian entertainment press, some random show on MTV said that F.I.R. was just a ripoff of Do As Infinity. Both are rock bands doing their own songs with a pretty girl as the singer and a couple of dudes who play the instruments. Of course, the DAI girl didn't take advantage of her band's success to shovel out a collection of her past pre-packaged, pre-written, Asian-idol-pop songs. On the other hand, I did buy it, so who's the loser now?