confusedSo, not having much I could get finished, I went through my WHC membership package, sorting the things I need to keep with me (not much) from those I can leave behind. Among the things I need is the Pocket Program. I looked through it to see if there was anything I wanted to attend.
There are lots of ways to arrange your programming schedule. It's fairly common to include a grid showing times and places of program items. Some conventions just list the programming chronologically, without the grid. What WHC06 has done is something I don't think I've ever seen before. The schedule is sorted Day : Location : Time, so for example on page 2 is the listing "Main Hall : Friday" with all of the program items happening there listed in chronological order, followed by page 3, which has "California Room : Panels : Friday" followed by the program items in that room in chronological order.
This listing would be a good thing to post on the door of each individual program room. Indeed, smart, well-organized conventions have been known to do this, so you can always look at the listing at a given room to make sure you're at the right item and nothing has changed. But in my opinion, this is a terrible way of arranging the pocket program for use by the members. The only listing orders I could think worse would be "Alphabetical by program item name" or "Random." In order to figure out what is happening at any given time, I have to cross-reference five separate lists!
This looks to me to be a programming schedule published by the Programming department, and optimized for their use, without giving a whole lot of thought to how the members are most likely to use it. As a conrunner, I'm loathe to criticize people too much, but this seems like a pretty obvious mistake to me. Am I imagining things?
Good thing I didn't really expect to attend much programming, anyway.
Aha, that job just finished, taking just over 3 hours (180 minutes) versus 20 minutes on the new machine. So that's a ninefold improvement in model run time. I am pleased.