Don’t we just love to test ourselves to see “which one” we are! I think I did this test years back. Perhaps you’ve seen it? Can you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain. And vice versa. Most see her turning anti-clockwise. Which I find IMPOSSIBLE to fathom. I can only see her going clockwise. Surprising…I’ve always convinced myself I’m completely left brained – rational, logical etc.

See the rundown of the right and left-brain functions. Apparently you can try to focus and change the direction.

Since I posted this, reader Teresa sent me a link to a site that explains how this works (and that the right/left brain divide isn’t accurate – we use both in tandem)…

What they reveal is how our brain processes visual information in order to create a visual model of the world. The visual system evolved to make certain assumptions that are almost always right (like, if something is smaller is it likely farther away). But these assumptions can be exploited to created a false visual construction, or an optical illusion.

The spinning girl is a form of the more general spinning silhouette illusion. The image is not objectively “spinning” in one direction or the other. It is a two-dimensional image that is simply shifting back and forth. But our brains did not evolve to interpret two-dimensional representations of the world but the actual three-dimensional world. So our visual processing assumes we are looking at a 3-D image and is uses clues to interpret it as such. Or, without adequate clues it may just arbitrarily decide a best fit – spinning clockwise or counterclockwise. And once this fit is chosen, the illusion is complete – we see a 3-D spinning image.

LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS

• uses logic
• detail oriented
• facts rule

A week or so ago I shared the apps I’m rapt about. Now a list of radical ones you use (albeit, not all of them are productive…in fact some are counterproductive…but I guess it’s that time of year), plus a few from people whose productivity levels we’re in awe of.

My assistant Jo loves these (she should probably be on commission for selling in Echofon…she wouldn’t rest until she was allowed to put it on my phone):

Echofon for Twitter (free)

This is the best app around for twitter-on-the-go, especially for those like me who tend to tweet a lot! It’s easy to navigate, with some handy ‘echofon specific’ features that make it super quick to update your status, ‘reply all’ or ‘retweet with comment’. It also does all the standard twitter things, including pics and videos. Love it.

Talking Carl (free)

This is just for sillies, and fun. I do some work with foster kids, so it’s handy to have some quirky kid-friendly, distractable apps on my phone for those tantrum-type moments. Talking Carl is a crazy red guy, and if you touch him, he laughs, and talks. If you talk, he copies you, and it’s HILARIOUS. Kids(and adults) love him. Check it out. This is he:

Kerri Sackville, blogger extraordinaire, soon-to-be-published author, and manic mum of three, raves about these:

Touchwriter ($1.99)

Okay, I’m loving Touchwriter. I’m forever writing myself notes, but a) always forget to carry a pen and paper, and b) lose the notes anyway. Touchwriter allows me to ‘handwrite’ notes with my finger, and then - unlike other ‘finger-writing’ apps – immediately shrinks the words as I write so that each notes can fit a lot of text. There is a space bar, paragraph break and different colours, and the notes can be saved or emailed. I prefer Touchwriter to the ‘finger-to-text’ apps, as I find they make a lot of errors when converting, and are hard to use.

I’m excited about a few apps that make life sweeter, better, lighter. I’ve listed the ones I swear by. Please do add yours to the mix below (I’ll do up another post down the track of your suggestions…).

Most of you know about Bump (free) and Shazam (free), yes? The former shares contacts when you bump another Iphone owner’s phone (which also has the Bump app installed). Bump!

The latter is just mandatory. You like a song on the radio. Or in a mall. You press the button. It tells you the name of said song and artist. You can then buy it on iTunes. Shazam!

And I’ve banged on enough in the past about Instapaper (free) for saving and reading Web pages after you’ve moved offline.

Others on my iphoney (be sure to add to the list at the bottom in the comments bit!):

Hipstamatic ($1.19)

This is seriously sweet. A photography app that will – unpredictably, randomly, in an artful way – saturate, blur, sepia your pics. It runs frames around them, makes them look like old-school Polaroids and so on. Here’s an example (the kid isn’t mine…Aldous is my best mate Rosie’s little urchin. BTW, I just noticed the Photo Restoration sign in the background…how synchrolicious!).

Sleep On It (free)

You an insomniac? Don’t know why? This one lets you track your nightly patterns and moods and daytime snoozes,  helping you work out what factors are affecting your sleep and how much sleep you need each night to feel rested and energized and other stuff. It’s also an alarm.

Google (free)

Don’t waste your time with the standard browser – the app is waaaay better and funnerer. You can voice your search – you can say “Caltex” it will use GPS to find you the nearest one.  Handy at trivia nights. Just say the topic and it will find the wiki for it. The recent update allows you to take a photo of, say, a book or DVD or a wine bottle and Google searches for information on it!! So clever. So fast.

One day I started a blog. I didn’t know where it would head. I spewed forth and it grew like a virus. I just wanted to share things.

Like all things with technology, it moved faster than I was able to adjust. So, truth be known, it’s not really what I thought it would be. But, then, it’s exactly what it needs to be. ‘Cos here it is.

I thought about doing a mass overhaul, to get it ship-shape (redesign, get it looking less “young”, change the name to…a real blog name!). But instead I’ve opted for gentle shifts.

On Wednesday I posted about how I hired a virtual assistant to help with my blog. They’ve kindly decided to offer everyone a discount on Freelancer – three project posts for free! When you register, use this code: “SARAH”. They’re also answering any questions you might have on the post.

Today, though, I want to share two other services I totally dig:

This is really really cool. Last week Arcade Fire, Google and artist Chris Milk, launched “The Wilderness Downtown“, an interactive video set to the band’s melancholy track “We Used to Wait.” Basically you type in the address of the home you grew up in and then it uses Google Maps and Google Street View to mix images of your childhood house into the video. Below is an image from my childhood home. We did actually have a house, but it was in a constant state of being built. In the meantime, we spent a lot of time sitting in dirt.

It also gets you to write a letter to your younger self, which is integrated into the clip, too.

It’s all a bit nerdy and is mostly about showcasing Google Chrome (which you download …free) and HTML5. Pundits are saying it’s The Future (man!) of music videos.

Whatever. I like the nostalgic nudge it provides.

The lyrics of the song that forms the soundtrack go like this:

I found this post on Lifehacker about how to be a great host replete with really clever free download. I thought I should share it because it’s really rather efficient. And sweet.

I personally get pretty uptight when guests stay. Having new people in my space confronts me. I live a pretty selfish life and I get all flustered when my routine is mucked about (mostly because I have no “fat” in my schedule…something I’m desperately working on right now…for another post). When friends and my large family step into into my home it kind of breaks my stride. Which sounds revoltingly ungenerous, I know…

That said I always put out flowers – daphne is a favourite – in the spare room, place a towel and facecloth on the end of the bed and bust my foof-foof valve (as my grandad used to say) to show them a good time. Lifehacker suggests we all go one step further and they’ve created a Guest Information Pack template you can download for free.

***Updated Friday 5pm: News is emerging the election will be called tomorrow. The PM is saying she’ll ask the GG to delay issuing the writ until Wednesday, which means IF YOU’RE NOT ENROLLED TO VOTE YOU’LL HAVE ABOUT FIVE DAYS TO DO SO. Do it at my link here.

***Updated Friday 5pm: Latika Bourke has started this election Twitter list of political journos to follow. For more, see my list below.

I keep getting asked the best way to stay up to speed with the stuff we all need to know for the election. Honestly? Twitter. It’s taken a while, but Twitter has really settled into itself and we’re kind of getting the hang of how to best use it. It’s not really for inane “I just ate 3 Maltesers” updates. It’s a business tool. And a media tool.

Heading into the election, Twitter will play a major role. News will break on Twitter (as it did with the Abbott/Turnbull spill). Dynamic, important debate will happen on Twitter. Without spin (there’s not enough characters!). On Twitter the media/opinion leaders we all love actually share what they REALLY think, rather than the publisher line.

Before I break into a list, a community announcement: The election COULD BE CALLED THIS WEEKEND, which means you need to be enrolled to vote NOW. Not on Monday. TODAY. Got it? Once the election is called, there’s about 1-5 days (depending on how fast they move things) to do so. If you’re a first-timer, or you’ve moved, or you have kids who might not be correctly enrolled, check out my election cheat sheet. Pass her around…

It’s a fact of life: these days we have to cull “electronic friends”  to cope with Sheer Influx of Cluttery Information. I think we all accept this, right? It’s not personal; it’s professional. I keep my “following” list at 108…it’s partly an auspicious thing.

But how to clear the clutter? This little gizmo – ManageFlitter – does it sniper-like.

It works by sorting your Twitter followers list into:

• Talkative or Quite – They tweet too much or too little.
• One Sided – They don’t follow you back.
• Possible Spam – They have no picture on their Twitter profile

OK. Seth Godin just alerted me to this one. A gizmo that allows you to publish things on the interweb a little privately. OK, just a little. The best way for me to demonstrate it to… demonstrate it: This is who I had lunch with today http://trick.ly/2P3

Yeah, you got it? I’m clearly not that secretive. But you know that, I reckon.

This url shortener – trick.ly – works by allowing link access only to those who can answer an intimate question about you. Inner-circle stuff. I love that the url for the site is actually trick.ly (no dot-com).

Lunch, by the way, was ace. The company was astute and dynamic and authentic. I drank green tea and ate parmigiana. Then there was a sun shower. The end.

I’ve come to accept very recently that it is our personal responsibility to be our own information gatekeepers. Everyone around me is constantly complaining how they’re overloaded. They can’t keep up with email. Their iphone is driving them mental. Blah blah blah. It’s time, I think, we realised that the greatest challenge our generation faces is controlling how we receive information. This much we know: we WILL continue to be flooded. Unless we install our own boundaries. No one else will do it for us.

The new wisdom is knowing this. The new status is being in control of it.  The new power is having firm boundaries. Like, for instance, standing tall and proud and declaring you only check email twice a day. Or boldly deciding you work a four-day week. Or not taking your phone out with you when you have dinner with someone you wish to explore intimacy with. I’ve experimented with all this. And more.

To this end another nifty little tip for stemming the tide of group work emails onto one’s phone, from timesonline.