Erik Hatcher's Blog

I can't get there from here

So, last night I decide to plan my first day at JavaOne. I pull out the thin Conference Schedule and Program Guide Addendum. Excellent - it has a calendar for Tuesday's sessions schedule, nicely formatted. The word "REST" pops out at me - thats a session (TS-3163) I want to attend. But it'd be nice to see who the speaker is and the abstract of the talk. Being the semi-clever guy that I am, I whip out the Program Guide to look up more details. I thought for sure I'd be able to just scan alphabetically through the guide and find that session number. Huh? No such luck. I go back to the schedule book and find a cross-reference which has the alphabetical/numerical ordered list which provides a Topic Number. Ummm.... ok.... now I have a topic number (Five) for this session. Back to the Program Guide to find the topic "Five". You would think that with a topic number and a session number that this would be enough information to find the info I desired. Not so fast.... within the topic Five area of the Program Guide, the sessions are alphabetized by the session title (which I just noticed while writing this rant). Sheesh.

Please, just give me a single piece of paper that has the full session schedule complete with speaker name, room location, and a brief abstract.

Comments

• Is that a mug shot or are you just happy to see me?
  I'm putting your blog picture down for "Best Mug Shot" of the show. :-)

  Posted by: johnm on June 10, 2003 at 09:09 PM

• Hear, hear!
  I had the same experience today. The solution is to go to the conference site online, choose your talks where everything's hyperlinked together, and then print the long summary. I followed this advice except I printed the short summary that tells me what and where, but not the whom, and when push comes to shove and I'm deciding between a good conversation and a talk, it's the speaker that determines where I go. So I was left flipping the pages as a human grep engine.
  

  Posted by: jhunter on June 11, 2003 at 01:17 AM

• This is absurd!
  I've been moaning about this situation for years now. I mention it every year in the post-conference surveys, but I suspect that those never get read anyway.

  I was initially impressed with the page-per-day layout in the Addendum this year, until I actually tried to use it. The most common use-case for this document is scanning the upcoming sessions to decide which one you want to attend. If you'd like to read the details for a session in the main program book, you need to use the following procedure:

  1. Note the session number
  2. Use the "Session Index" in the addendum to determine the "Topic Number" for the session.
  3. Locate the Topic Section in the main program (a task that is absurdly difficult because the topic numbers don't appear on every page!!!)
  4. Locate the session, which is alphabetized based on the session name.

  This is about 20 times more complicated than it needs to be. Why can't the addendum simply list the page number in the main program book? And what is the point of organizing the sessions into the virtually useless "Topics", anyway? If the "Topic" number is so important, why can't can't the topic number be part of the seesion number? The two-page spreads mapping sessions to topics in the Addendum are just ridiculous.

  Sorry for the rant - I've thought for years that this lousy organization was just my own pet peeve at an otherwise great conference, but it's nic e to see that others are as annoyed by this as I am.

  Posted by: jpo on June 11, 2003 at 04:39 PM

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