Monday, August 6, 2012

Holiday Schedule Blues Update

The previous article was about the upcoming holiday festivities, and how accurate any of our ideas of the meal program schedules may or may not be.

On the eve of the holiday in question, which is apparently Alberta Heritage Day, this final report is ready for you, the hungry poor and/or curious. The gist of it is that TDIN's schedule is basically sound, with a couple messed-up details. So they did pretty well and you can pretty much just go by it with a couple corrections.

Since no field research was done, this is still not a strong day for this website. But it's better than recent holidays. This time, emails were sent out to confirm TDIN's holiday meal schedule, and the staff of half of the agencies questioned did respond to those inquiries.

So here's the situation: the calendar on this site for August 6th is probably accurate. Things that say (unconfirmed) on them are probably not happening. Things that say (confirmed) on them are happening according to their staff.

Good Shepherd's a go, normal hours. Where it says "hours" on the TDIN thing, it should say "breakfast," though. And where it says "breakfast," it should say drop-in, according to their staff, because it's not a substantial breakfast, and that is definitely true. It's a great drop-in. It's somewhere between nothing and breakfast. It's enough to get you to an actual breakfast.

Scott Mission is a go. They'll let people into their first meal between 10:30am and 10:45am, and their second meal between 11:30 and 11:45am. Remember, you can only go to one of these two meals.

The Good Neighbours Club is a go, but where it says supper? That's apparently just a snack:
Breakfast: 8:15am - 9:15am ($1)
Lunch: 12:15pm - 1:15pm ($1)
Supper Snack: 3:00pm - 3:15pm ($1)

CONC is in, but they're doing their weekend hours: A snack from 11am - noon, and lunch from 1pm - 2pm. With CONC, you want to get there early.

Maybe 4 out of 8 confirmations isn't bad. It sort of is, though.

Gateway, Maxwell Meighan, Council Fire and PARC haven't confirmed, but if the rest of the TDIN schedule is any indication, then their programs, as well as those who aren't mentioned in this article are probably happening as indicated in their PDF, and maybe one of the meals is actually a snack.

TDIN did actually manage to try to post their PDF, which was also emailed out onto their mailing list, onto the internet, on this page, but the download for the PDF doesn't work.

Since PDFs are a pain, here it is, reposted in HTML form: TDIN's Holiday August 6th Meal Programs Schedule

It's pretty messy: each page is there first in an image form of the PDF that was mailed out, and then the text for that page is underneath it. So it makes for a weird document. But it's better than TDIN's website does with their broken document link. What is with the obsession with PDF files anyway? These places really have totally given up on getting people to just do web design.

If a broke person could make this website on public computers, between meal programs, to save having to write a big schedule list down for friends in need of info, then it's easy to see how someone with web design skills ends up broke. They're not being used. The web design that needs doing isn't being done. Same with the rest of the job market.

So there's your guide to this holiday. It's enough.

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