Many comedians begin their routine by stating the obvious differences between two groups of people. Perhaps it’s men and women, or white and black, or whatever. We humans love to categorize other people into groups. Pessimists and optimists, liberals and conservatives, the list goes on and on. Well, I’m not going to buck tradition that much; I am convinced that there are two basic types of people as well: problem solvers and problem finders.

The definition for these two groups is fairly self-evident. A problem finder is someone who excels at finding problems. That’s a pretty large scope, to be sure. These are the types of people that are never satisfied. They find something to complain about in every situation. When you ask how they’re doing, they say things like, “Well, I could be better.” They are experts in identifying the nearly-invisible cracks in the glass, the slight imbalance in the supposedly symmetrical piece of machinery.

You may be saying to yourself that this type of person is a pessimist, but I maintain that an important distinction between a problem finder and a pessimist is that a problem finder can be very specific about exactly what in a given situation or event is bad, while a pessimist is less able to do this in general. A pessimist can tell you how bad he thinks it is, but getting down to specifics is difficult because it’s not about specific issues or problems he sees, it’s about the way he perceives his environment and the events surrounding him. Hope that distinction makes sense.

Obviously a problem solver is someone who solves problems. These aren’t particularly complex definitions, are they? This is the type of person that is constantly trying to save the world. You have a problem? They have a solution! Well, they believe they do. There is nothing they can’t help you with. If they’re self-aware enough to realize they don’t know the answer, then they’ll happily redirect you to someone who does. After all, they have a pathological need to solve your problem, whether that’s what you want or not. Sometimes, you just want someone to listen to your story about your horrible experience or situation, and simply agree with you. “Yeah, that does suck!” “Yeah, that pisses me off too!” You’re looking for a friendly acknowledgement of the suckiness of your situation, and it can be frustrating when a problem solver patronizes you by offering what they think is a simple solution for your problem. “What are you complaining about? Take action!” they say.

I think it’s clear that everyone has a bit of both of these quirks in their personalities. We all are proactive about solving problems on some occasions, and sometimes we’re very good about finding the problems, the holes, the cracks. However, since I am an engineer, and I work with engineers, I have concluded that engineers are predominately problem solvers.

This makes sense. What is engineering? At its core, it’s finding elegant solutions to complex problems while maintaining an awareness of the needs and constraints of the solution (such as cost). It’s problem solving, pure and simple, so it is not unusual that good engineers are good problem solvers. However, I maintain that problem finders are equally, if not more important than problem solvers, if only because good ones are harder to find.

I know plenty of engineers who can solve problems in fantastic, elegant ways, but can’t easily identify the problems in their solutions, or even potential problems outside of the original problem description that was given to them. They need someone who can do that for them. The best teams at Microsoft in my opinion have a cynic, a guy who takes everything and tears it apart. It’s never good enough. And the best problem solvers I know are able to take that information and make a better solution.

So I guess my conclusion is that it’s OK if you’re not the best problem solver or problem finder. Just know that you aren’t. Self-awareness is the key, you know. In my own case, I have realized that I am a much better problem finder. I’m a natural cynic, and a bit of a perfectionist. And hey, I’m OK with that.

It was a bit of a toss-up whether to categorize this post under Geekdom, Daily Dose of Tyler, or Work, since this project certainly has a bit of all three. However, since I haven’t gotten around to implementing arbitrary tagging on my site, I can only pick one, so I went with work. Anyway, as you can see from visiting this site, I am in the process of transitioning things from my old GeekLog-based system to MOSS 2007. (A quick note on GeekLog - I love it. It’s been great for me, it has a lot of great features, it’s customizable, highly recommended! The only reason I’m moving is because I helped build MOSS, and I like it a lot.)

Anyway, you can follow my progress by checking out my first post on this process at the Enterprise Content Management blog. There will be several more posts over there, and I am working on an in-depth piece-by-piece feature breakdown for the site that I’ll put up here at some point. Gotta get the site finished first, though.

This is a bit of a sandbox right now, as I am still actively working on the implementation of the site. It might go up and down, and things will probably look wrong. Feel free to send me bug reports if you find something that looks wrong.

Yesterday I posted an entry on the Microsoft SharePoint team blog about Content Deployment, a feature I work on. Take a look if you’re interested… This is the kind of thing that’s causing me never to update this site…

Yes, I have entered the ranks of the 1337 gamers. I finally gave into the urge and paid $75 premium to get an XBox 360 off of eBay. Yeah, I could have waited even longer, but frankly, I was sick of the constant monitoring of the unt1tled XBox tracker, the random phone calls to friends to see if they could pick me up one in their area, etc. Anyway, the unit arrived Saturday morning, so I immediately plugged it in and wasted an entire day playing with it.

So what do I think of it? Well, in a word, it is awesome. It outputs beautifully on my 480p HDTV (alas, I don’t think my TV supports 720p – time to buy a 73") in glorious widescreen deliciousness, and it was brain-dead easy to get logged on to XBox Live. Once there, I downloaded a bunch of Arcade game demos, including the utterly fantastic Geometry Wars, which I bought for 400 Microsoft Points ($5) within 20 minutes of playing. There is so much awesomeness in this sexy little machine that it is tough to write it all down. But there are a couple of areas that really stand out, so I thought I’d write a little about them.

Achievements

The concept is so simple – set mini goals within games and award players points when they achieve these goals. Then centralize everything on a website so players can compare their results to all players globally, or just amongst their friends. This is what the XBox team has done with Achievements. An example of an achievement in Geometry Wars is the Pacifism Achievement, which is awarded for playing the first 60 seconds of the game without shooting (pretty tough when you first start out). Another is awarded when you earn 100,000 points, and still another when you make it all the way to 100,000 points without dying once. You get the idea. Because achievements are super- public – you can go visit my profile on xbox.com and see all the achievements I’ve attained for a certain game – it adds a huge competitive edge to the games. For example, because I can compare my achievements with my friends, I am more apt to keep playing so that I can keep my edge over other players. It also adds extra incentive to purchase full versions of games, since you can’t earn achievements in demos.

Demos

And speaking of demos – the online nature of XBox Live allows publishers to put up downloadable game demos in the XBox Live Marketplace. So if you have the hard drive, you can download demos of games such as Condemned, Fight Night, Full Auto, etc. before you buy them. It’s great – but unfortunately the demos are very large (nearly 600 MB for the Condemned demo), and there is no way to a) queue up multiple downloads and b) download in the background. This actually really sucks – it means that while you’re downloading a demo, or any other type of content, you can’t do anything else on your 360. The only silver lining is that downloads are resumable, so if you get bored downloading something and want to get in another round of Geometry Wars, you can cancel it and resume it later. You’d think with 3 cores on the CPU, they could spawn a background thread to handle downloads in the background, but whatever. Its still freakin’ cool.

Media Center

The original XBox had a Media Center extender that you could use with your Media Center 2005 PC (I’m ignoring the hacks you could use to get XBMC or Linux on there). Unfortunately, there were two core faults – it required a disc to be inserted into the XBox, and it was pretty low quality because all the graphic processing had to be done on the Media Center PC and then transmitted through the network. Plus the XBox couldn’t be turned on and of remotely (the 360 does this beautifully). In short, I bought it and did not like it at all. The 360 changes that. It runs the media center app natively, and connects up to your Media Center just to start streaming the video/music/pictures. I think all the graphics processing is done on the 360 itself, so it just looks better and is more responsive. Plus, it uses the same remote as a typical media center remote, so you can move your large, loud Media Center PC (which is what you wind up with when you build your own on a budget as I did) into some dark corner of your apartment and use the 360 as your sole media center. Trust me – words cannot describe how freakin' awesome this is.

Well, there’s a ton more to say about this stunning piece of hardware/software engineering, but I am already suffering Geometry Wars withdrawal, so I’d better get back to it. I have achievements to earn, after all. Look me up if you’re on XBox Live – my Gamertag is Diametrix.

Thanksgiving is a bit of a non-holiday to me. The problem is that it comes to close to Christmas. Heck, I started hearing Christmas music in the grocery store the week before Thanksgiving. What’s up with that? Anyway, this makes the third year that I haven’t done anything for the holiday. I got invited a few places this year, but frankly, I wasn’t in the mood. I felt like I needed some serious alone time (which is weird, because I am alone most of the time anyway), and I have definitely gotten it this weekend. But I realized that a lot of the posts – heck, all of the posts – I’ve made today have been pretty negative, so I guess it’s time to be positive and post some of the things I am thankful for. This is a Thanksgiving tradition, I guess, but I was reminded to do it after I read Kristin’s post about it on her and her husband’s blog. Thanks for the reminder Kristin. (I also read about her baking peanut butter cookies for Marco. Lucky guy, that Marco.) Anyway, here goes:

• Friends: The transition to living in Puget Sound hasn’t been easy, but it would have been harder if I didn’t have some awesome friends that make an effort to keep in touch, come to visit when they can, and generally do their part to keep me in good spirits.
• A good job: I complain a bit about my job, but I am thankful for it. Relative financial stability is a wonderful thing, and I know I’m in the right line of work for now.
• My desire to continue learning and improving myself: Not to toot my own horn, but I am thankful and proud that even though I am out of school and am a working stiff now, I continue to try and learn new things and improve myself. It’s not just the learning, either, but also the physical stuff I am doing for my body and self. Losing weight has been tough, and two years in braces won’t be easy (I start the orthodontic journey January 6th, wish me luck), but I am thankful I have a positive attitude about it, and am proud of myself for doing these things instead of just pushing them aside or to the back of my mind.
• Music: I guess this is a little over-indulgent, but I am thankful for music. Both music I listen to and music I write/perform. It’s such an important part of my life – I don’t know where I’d be without it. I have a hard time remembering what life was like without an iPod these days.

I guess it’s kind of short, but it’s my list.