dragoncon_lj_archive | program guide

donastraya.livejournal.com posting in

I think it might be too early to ask, but has anyone seen a daily program/panel guide? i.e what time what panel is scheduled for

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From:

jarissa.livejournal.com

... Really? You really have trouble finding it?

Please believe that I am not meaning to be snarky here. You know, I haven't actually looked at it in over half a year; maybe it got shuffled out. Let's take a look at it!

Hunh. I did a Google search for "dragoncon" and hit "I feel lucky". That got me to http://www.dragoncon.org/index.php (the home page). There's that nice Navigation menu on the left; I picked "Convention Events" and that wasn't it, but I could look at individual tracks under "Fan Tracks", or under "Public/Media Relations" there are links for the Pocket Program and Schedule Grids. Either one of those would be likely to give a visitor the schedule that'll get printed in the Pocket Program, once the volunteer staff have those close enough to post.

I dunno, cousin, I'm not finding this hard. Granted, I'm not representative of the target audience, but when I asked my late-fifties-aged mom, who's quite pleased to understand what an "mp3 audio book" is, if she could find where the "Dragon*Con Schedule" might be, she came back to the phone in four minutes and said, "Baby, they haven't got it ready to show yet." I'm figuring the target audience is probably MORE tech-savvy than either of us, neh?

From:

joreth

First of all, I code html by hand and I run the website for other conventions and organization, so please do not make any assumptions about my "tech savvy".

Second, last year I found the link to the Pocket Program here in LJ by way of a google search because the website NEVER HAD IT UPLOADED. If it did, it was after the con started because that's when I stopped looking for it, having finally found it in the LJ forum.

The track schedules were also never fully listed. Only a handful of the tracks in the list actually had schedules available, most of which were not tracks that I wanted to attend.

So no, it is not actually all that easy to find the schedule. You can find a couple of links where a schedule is supposed to go, but the schedule doesn't actually make it there.

From:

jarissa.livejournal.com

Joreth, by "MORE tech-savvy than either of us", I meant my mom and myself. I am sad if you did not understand that, but the two people mentioned before "us" were in fact 1=me and 2=Mom, which is pretty simple computation in standardized English grammar code.

I found the link to the PP on the website last year. Before Tuesday. Downloaded the whole thing to my Palm, as a .pdf, then went back and edited it down to the tracks I and my household were most interested in, and redownloaded it to my Palm as a spreadsheet.

You're looking for a chance to be righteously irritated, methinks. Have a fun link (http://www.crankypantshome.com/), and I hope your weekend goes better than today did!

From:

joreth

If you think this is "righteously irritated", then I suggest you try to stop projecting emotions onto text.

I am not the only person who has had trouble finding the schedule in the past, and as a con organizer myself, I am offering samples of difficulty by visitors and suggestions on how to improve the website and the visitor's experience.

As for your comments about misunderstanding, yes, I apologize for misunderstanding, but it's rather condescending of you to throw in that last bit about "pretty simple computation of standardized English grammar code". Had it occurred to you that perhaps English is not my first language, or that people on the internet did use formal English rules in their writing, so that it would not be my natural assumption to apply formalized rules to your comment?

You're looking for a chance to be righteously defensive, methinks, by someone pointing out a problem in the organization that, clearly, others have seen as well.

From:

joreth

should be "people on the internet *do not use* formal English..."

From:

jarissa.livejournal.com

Man, take a nap on it and look at this conversation with fresh eyes, would you? If you still want to have a fight about something, awesome: contact me directly, we'll pick a topic and agree on a set of rules and go at it.

Alternatively, if you just NEED to have the last word, go ahead; I don't care about "winning" so much as I care about "making our world more pleasant".

One of my husbands is a professional AI programmer, and the other is a software tester, and both are considered highly expert in their respective professions by large chunks of the industry; I know how to phrase things for coder consumption. I could have improved my statement a tad by using "parse" instead of "understand" -- but as a man who stood upon his dignity over the phrase "tech savvy", especially in terms of "I code html by hand and I run the website", you are implicitly setting the conversation onto a computer geek basis of thought and comprehension. A person who grokks computer code is a person who processes concepts in terms of definition and function.

Pronouns refer to the most recently mentioned applicable noun(s). This isn't "formal English", this is kindergarten English. Persons who learn English as a non-native language are MORE likely to understand the textbook version of the written language than they are the colloquial versions; your suggestion is not relevant to the topic of you getting crankypants over your own failure to succeed in a Reading Comprehension Skill Check, much less to the OP topic of "has anyone seen the schedule yet?"

Nor is your general Intertubes Rage entirely relevant to "has anyone seen the schedule yet?". You were doing good on the statement that you haven't seen it but thought you'd seen a Tweet that it'd be out today, only you couldn't find it; you might've been okay with slight frothing at the keyboard over your personal trouble finding it at all before con started last year, but you set the connotative levels of scorn in your word choices to eleven.

Have I seen the schedule yet? No. Are you making anything better for anybody by kvetching at the the web staff (in absentia, no less!) because you, personally, can't find the schedule in one click? No. Are you helping Straya solve her quest for intel? No. Are you making yourself feel any better by getting picking out something I wrote in a post that starts with the assumption "Joreth has pointed out a problem", tests it, and finds it to not prove true?

If yes, then I refer back to my closing statement in the previous post: Have a fun link (http://www.crankypantshome.com/), and I hope your weekend goes better than today did!

You sure remind me of my baby brother. He's a tad bit older than you. Very smart guy, but so quick to jump to angry conclusions! And always shocked when I really DO decide to get antagonistic, instead of carefully pointing out independent facts and alternative viewpoints.

From:

joreth

1) I am not male

2) if you don't care so much about "winning" so much as you care about "making our world more pleasant" then drop the conversation already. If you didn't "need" to have the last word, then this comment didn't "need" to be posted at all.

3) understanding math is not the same thing has having perfect English skills. Nor do you have any basis to make any assumptions about how I "process" or "grokk" or "parse" anything as you have no idea how my mind works except for the fact that I understand html coding and therefore understand how websites work, which was a fact that I had to provide. I apologized for the misunderstanding already regarding the pronoun "us" - it is a common mistake, from both English as a first language and English as a second language people. Persons who learn English a second language are not "more likely to understand the textbook version of the written language" because it depends on how they learned English. My best friend learned English by watching BBC comedies while growing up in Germany, so he has a lot of trouble with formal grammar rules, but he understands English humor (better than I do, not having been exposed to British humor until adulthood). Pronouns are notoriously complicated to a large portion of the population. Again with the assumptions and lumping in people to categories. And I apologized for it already.

4) You still have not seen anything regarding "emotion" from me, let alone a strong emotion like "rage" or even "scorn", however your posts are just dripping with condescension and not conducive to encouraging me to be friendly towards you. The person who merely offered the links to where I could find the schedule was MUCH more helpful and I told her so.

5) My original complaint has not been proven untrue. The schedule *is* currently not available, which is annoying, often not made available until right before the con, which is also annoying, and when it is made available, it could be made easier to find than it currently is, and I gave specific suggestions as to how that could be accomplished.