pain-b-gon

Well, I didn't get to lie down and close my eyes last night, so I did the next best thing: took a Tylenol. ;) It relieved the headache enough to let me feed Isaac and get him to sleep. Then I went to bed much sooner than I normally do, and slept pretty well (and he slept through) so I feel better today, yay.

That was really random, though. I still don't know what caused the headache yesterday. It was weird, and annoying.

moods

LJ has moods for "cranky" and "grumpy." Don't you think the difference between these is very, very subtle? How would you describe the distinction?

Ditto "gloomy" and "morose."

Ditty "aggravated," "irritated," and "annoyed."

Ditto "productive" and "accomplished."

What other LJ-moods do you think are redundant? And does this annoy, irritate, or aggravate you? or do I just need to get a life? ;)

candidate tests

One of the software developers at my company has created a test that is given to people we interview for new developer jobs. I'm not clear on the details of the test, but it involves doing some actual coding; the candidates are given a laptop and the appropriate software tools. And the test apparently is fiendishly hard; candidates aren't actually expected to "pass it," but are judged on how they approach the problem, how well they progress toward solving it in a given amount of time, etc. We have had people actually walk out of the interview because the test was so hard.

So now we're trying to hire a new tech writer in addition to me, and it was suggested (humorously) that we should try to devise a similar test for tech writers. One suggestion was to have one of our head engineers go in and explain a component of our software to the candidate, the engineer having been instructed to go off on a tangent and ramble for a while; and then the candidate would be asked to write up a summary. Heh.

An alternate idea, a little less sadistic ;), is to write up a five-ish-page summary of our product and have the candidate condense it down to one page. I think that would be a great test of candidates' writing/editing abilities as well as their abilities to understand the technology and the audience. I would love to put together something like that myself, including a bunch of grammatical/formatting/spelling errors as well just to see how much they would catch.

Unfortunately, I have so much work that I don't actually have time to do that. But it would be great.

Anyone know a good tech writer in the Boston area who needs a job?