Keeping observation skills sharp
Picture puzzles are something I used to love doing. Life magazine recently released an entire magazine devoted to picture puzzles (find the differences). Until I saw this magazine I thought these puzzles were only for kids. As I flipped through the magazine I noticed the puzzles were more difficult than I remembered from my childhood.
I did some looking at home and found Life has some examples online
http://www.life.com/Life/picture_puzzle/
Along the way I found this bug
I’ve done all the examples online and had a great time. This type of mental workout is great for keeping observation skills sharp and it directly applies to using observations skills in testing. I consider picture puzzles to be the tester equivalent of warm ups or pre-game shows for athletes. 
Try them out and see if you can find the differences. You can be guaranteed your testing superpowers will increase!
December 13th, 2007 at 1:28 PM
these are great! just like playing the online game but different.
January 23rd, 2008 at 12:32 AM
Actually, I used a trick to find all of them far faster than I could by naked-eye comparison.
I set up two windows, in my browser, both pointing to the URL of the puzzle. Then I scrolled the second window so that the second picture completely and perfectly overlapped the first picture in the first window. Then I flipped between them by pressing Ctrl-Tab rapidly. The differences flickered like a strobe light.
“Instead of changing the decision-maker, change the context in which the decision is made.” That’s a quote from Malcolm Gladwell’s talk on his book Blink. Instead of changing the observer, change the context in which the observation is made.
—Michael B.