A life more ordinary.

Yesterday I took the Political Spectrum Quiz that popped up in my Facebook feed from a friend.  After answering fifty or so questions the app puts you on a two-by-two matrix with left-right and authoritarian-libertarian axes.  This is where I came out:

I wasn’t surprised by where I ended up on the matrix.  What did surprise me was that the average of all the people who have taken the quiz was almost identical to my score.  The results are probably highly skewed since the population answering the quiz is (I think) quite skewed, but the results reflect the population none the less.

What I found really interesting were the two graphs below.  As part of the quiz people can self identify as Democrats or Republicans.  My score puts me firmly in the Democrat camp and again wasn’t a surprise.  What was a surprise was the wide scatter in the Republican chart.  Thinking back to the Presidential Election I do remember some very divergent views from Republicans, and the graph below bears that out.  Clearly a right-of-center message is going to resonate, but the wide left-right and up-down scatter suggests that finding a ‘message’ that resonates with the different wings of the party will continue to be very challenging, and that it is highly likely that alienation of large numbers of voters will happen if ‘hard line’ stances continue to be taken.  In the UK, Tony Blair’s New Labour project redefined the Labour Party for a new era and a new set of voters.  Maybe the Republicans need to do something similar?  Just my 2c.

TimeScrolleris a niche app for those of us that attend conference calls across multiple timezones. It would also be useful if you need to call you granny in Australia or your friend in India and don’t want to wake them in the middle of the night.

Select as many cities as you wish and TimeScroller shows you whether it is a good time to call based on a red, yellow, green scale. You can select any local time and TimeScroller will show you the time in all the other locations.

Finally, TimeScroller can create an email with the times and locations listed. $1.99.

Tide Graph is a great app for those of us with boats in tidal waters. The single page UI is well laid out, let’s you select your location from an online database an shows tides on any date and time you want. The current version also remembers the most recent data for offline viewing. $1.99

SplashID is one of the many, many password storing apps out there. I paticularly like it because there are iPhone, Mac and PC versions. The iPhone version syncs wirelessly with the other two and makes it pretty easy to keep all your web passwords, bank and other details safe, secure and where and when you need them. $9.99.

Photogene is an image editing app that provides cropping, straightening, rotating, text bubbles and a number of other tools. I use it to create the images for these blog entries. Certainly not Photoshop, but it does more than enough to be a useful addition to the toolbox. $2.99