Curiouser and Curiouser!

A while back I wrote a modification to the Radio news aggregator page which added a button for toggling all the checkboxes on or off. This was pretty handy but trashed by a Userland update. I could never muster the willpower to figure out how I did it again, and watch it disappear again at some unspecified point in the future so i've done without.

Today I slapped myself for being a fool and wrote a JavaScript bookmarket which does the same thing. It just toggles every checkbox it finds on the page.

I've learned some more tricks for writing Bookmarklets, since last time, so this one should work the same on IE and Mozilla (although I won't be testing it on IE).

New Bush records, same old questions. Why did the "outstanding young pilot" stop flying? Why don’t the records document his time in Alabama? And what about the missing physical? The 400-page document dump has no answers. [Salon.com]

Until you make it possible for an ordinary person, without oil money or dynstasty backgrounds, to run for president you are never going to have an honest man in the Whitehouse. It's too much of a magnet for the power hungry or the friends of the power hungry. I hold out little hope for Kerry, Edwards, or Dean. They aren't Bush but what are they exactly?

What an interesting race it would be to have a dozen, non party, ordinary, smart, Joe's running. People who don't realise their entire life has been leading to this momement until they're actually there and doing it.

Right now I think America would be better off with a lottery. Just pick someone at random every 4 years. You couldn't do any worse than you are now.

My capsule review is: Don't buy a Motorola V600 if you actually want to use it for making phone calls. In all other respects it's great.

I've been waiting for the Motorola V600 to come out for quite a while. It's the phone I want to buy. I was delighted, yesterday, to finally hold one in my hands and play with it. Truly a thing of beauty and a great feature set. I was ready to hand over £50 that I don't have for the pleasure of owning one. Only one hurdle remained...

Reading about the phone on the web the reviews were all positive about how good it felt to own one etc... except for one review which complained about voice quality.

So I put my SIM in the phone and made a call. Indeed the quality was poor, tinny with a lot of distortion even at half volume. The speakerphone didn't sound great either but in a shop with music it's hard to tell. Additionally the person I was calling said the clarity at their end wasn't brilliant but again the music might be a factor there.

I was in town today so I thought I would try again. I went to a different store and tested. Again the sound quality was very poor. I got the shop assistant to try it and he agreed, noting that other customers had returned the phone with similar complaints. He certainly didn't seem surprised when I declined to purchase.

So there you go. Great screen, camera, bluetooth, GPRS, cool lights on the front, but useless as a phone. Pity.