Of Cows, Books and Other Animals

Continuing the series of articles covering my time as Head of I.T. & M.I.S. at Myerscough College, a land-based (agriculture and horticulture college but rapidly diversifying into other areas).

It's early April 2000 at Myerscough - well it was early April everywhere else I suppose but I probably won't be mentioning many other places in this article so we'll stick to Myerscough College for now. I had by now been at the college for six months and at last things seemed to be moving in the right direction. The first phase of the new network had gone in. Some of the dafter "innovations" that the older network had installed were still there but at least were not causing problems.

One of these was an experiment with computer card-controlled access to rooms. These are familiar now to lots of people. In hotels for instance, instead of having a physical metal key that you turn in a lock, there's a pad on the door; you press your keycard to it and the door unlocks for you to simply push open. In 2000 these were innovative to say the least. They had been installed in the college in just two places. My office and the door leading to the technician's office and server room. These doors had no handles, no keyholes, just the pad and a prayer that the card would work. If it didn't then it was tough, because the computer that controlled the system was behind those locked doors...

But anyway, on this bright April day, Jayne and I during our lunch break took a walk half a mile up the road from the main campus to Lodge Farm, which was the college's dairy farm.

Cattle can breed all year long, but some 70-75% of cows are born March to May so we were in the middle of that season. There were lots of calves in the sheds, sheltering from the odd shower and cold spell that April is prone to in our neck of the woods.

We were walking through here alone. The staff knew that we were college staff and left us to our own devices. What we hadn't known until then was just how human sounding a cow's cough is. At several points, particularly in a darker part of the sheds a cow would cough and we would jump out of our skins!

The milking shed. Although students were, I think, still taught how to milk a cow by hand, most were milked using modern machinery. It was all the same to the cows. One minute they were in place, hooked up and the next they were walking out with a look of relief and satisfaction...

It amused me how many students were amazed at the process. At the start of any given academic year you could ask students "where does milk come from?" and the answer would be, "a bottle." "Yes but where does the milk in the bottles come from?" Pause for slight confusion, then "the supermarket..." The next question would totally baffle them.

A bit ago in an earlier article I promised you a look at the Animal Academy. This was opened formally by Lord Shuttleworth on Wednesday, 26 April 2000. Here he uncovers a memorative placque, watched by Kathy Kissick the Head of Animal Studies, Principal John Moverley and the Chair of Governors.

On another occasion the Mayor and Mayoress of Wyre were shown round. The Mayor was treated to a close encounter with a blue-tongued skink by one of the staff and here the Mayor and Mayoress admire the intricate tunnels and pipework enjoyed by the guinea pigs or hamsters. Can't quite remember which they were now, but I do remember just how vocal the guinea pigs were with each other. "Alright Fred? Been down that new bit of piping yet? Oh, hey-up, one of them big two-legged things has just come in to look at us..."

The aquaria room. Tropical, cold water and sea water tanks. I loved it. There's something very relaxing about looking at them. Though something very exacting and exhausting about looking after them all...

The college was training vetinary nurses, so needed an operating theatre. This large fluffy doggie was equipped with large fluffy internal organs that could withstand dire things being done to them. Never said a great deal, never complained, but was totally hooked on pretend anaesthetic...

I was still writing my articles for the National Information and Learning Technologies Association (NILTA) - in fact was one of their Directors by then.

In the summer of 2000 they had been commissioned to survey colleges with regard to the extent, suitability and effectiveness of their I.T. networks. This was to identify any problems around capacity, management and maintenance, suitability and security. It was to be published under the umbrella of something called the National Learning Network of which several centrally-funded agencies had a hand in supporting: Becta and JISC amongst them.

By early summer the draft was completed but unfortunately there were a few issues with grammar and with the fact that there were lots of graphs with all shades of colours, but the eventual book would be published in black and white only. I wasn't told exactly why the original author wasn't asked to re-write it (though the deadline was one issue) and I was asked if I would re-write it over the summer.

So we didn't take a holiday that year until the second half of August. I changed all the different types of graph (especially the 3D pie charts that weren't easy to evaluate) and made them all into bar charts with lines in descending order so that you could see the difference between bars of very similar values, using patterns instead of shades that could be distinguished one from the other. It went off to be scrutinised by the Further Education Funding Coucil and JISC who would then think of something else that they wanted in it and it would come back with a request for either a change or an insert. Time and time again.

I was heartily sick of the thing by the time it was accepted but accepted and published it eventually was. I still have a copy, but you won't find my name in it at all. But I know - and now, so do you! At one of the conferences I attended early in the following academic year, Keith Duckitt of the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC) found me one evening at the bar.

"John, come and join us on our table - we have a bottle..." Well the bottle was champagne and I found myself seated amongst the great and powerful folks of both Further and Higher Education. One of them would later have a great significance in my career, Malcolm Read, who was the Executive Secretary of JISC, one of which's Advisory Services I would later work for. The re-write of the book may have driven me half-mad, but it became obvious that it was thought I had done a good job.

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Myerscough College, Computers and Green Things

It's March 2000. Well not now, but the time I'm writing about was March 2000. More memories of working at Myerscough College in a part of Lancashire called Bilsborrow I wondered who Bill was and did he ever return what it was he borrowed...?

So here I was, lying on the floor of the Animal Academy, 18 inches away from Merlin, the iguana, who was wondering what the heck... Merlin was one of Myerscough's rescued animals. At this particular moment he was probably wondering whether he needed rescuing again...

Merlin, at some point before being rescued, had been kept in a cage that was too small as he grew and was not properly furnished with light to simulate sunlight. I can't remember whether he got too much or too little UV light after all these years, but whichever it was had left him with calcium deposits that made him a bit mis-shaped, put kinks in his tail and made him a star on TV whenever camera crews came to visit - which was surprisingly frequent.

Myerscough had two access roads. This one was its secondary way in, used mainly by staff and those who were visiting the Plant Centre and had been quite rutted - the road that is, not the Plant Centre visitors. It had had to be closed for a few weeks whilst drainage and then re-surfacing work went on and on 20 March 2000 it re-opened along with a new row of car parking spaces outside the Plant Centre.

At the same time work was going on to extend the college refectory and dining area, which as the college student numbers went up was becoming crowded. A brand new dining area would be created when a new Equine building and arena was built. I had suggested having a public dining area with windows to the arena, having visited a pub restaurant that had a similar set up. It was some months before the new Equine facility was built and by then either they had forgotten it was me that first mooted the idea or they thought perhaps that passing on an appreciative thank you might lead to me wanting some sort of reward. Anyway no such thanks were made.

I mentioned in a previous article that the grain store was to be dismantled so that an exhibition hall could be built. This is it being built.

This was taken for the news pages on the college website as we took delivery of 50 new PCs that had been long awaited in the computer suite. The old PCs were to be kept for word processing duties, though I was rightly dubious about their suitability even for such a simple task.

With a brand new and fast network I was still getting complaints that it was hideously slow and asked what students were doing when it appeared slow. It turned out they were producing huge Word files with pictures that they just copied from the Internet and pasted into Word. I had to explain to the teacher in charge that this meant pictures would be pasted as huge .bmp files within the Word document and that the answer was to reduce them in size and save them as much smaller jpegs (.jpg) and then import them.

Then it turned out that the students were producing documents running to hundreds of pages. There was nothing wrong with the network but the size of the Word files was greater than the memory of the computers. When this happens, computers start to "swap". This means that the contents of the computer's memory not being used at the time are saved to the hard disk whilst something more important needs memory and is then retrieved again afterwards. This can happen scores if not hundreds of times a second. No wonder the machines were being slow. But it was the machines not the network.

So I had to write instructions on the student intranet explaining some of this and showing how to use the rudimentary image processing software that we had at the time to reduce the size of image files and then how to split Word documents into chapters and how to set page numbers so that chapters started at the correct page number instead of going back to page one for each chapter.

Spring sprung. Or maybe it sprang... I was too busy to take all that much notice. One day I was in the MIS room where all the data entry to the Management Information System was undertaken. Although the college was using Dolphin software for their new students this had only been brought in for the 1999-2000 academic year and data from previous years was still stored in the old Femis software that I had worked on at Preston.

I was dumbstruck when asked to write a program on the old system to display a list of students for a given course. "Is that not already catered for?" I asked in suprise. No. It seemed that my predecessor had not saved any queries at all and had written bespoke queries each time he was asked, even if they were repeatedly required. I wrote a query in about 30 seconds and the entire room stopped aghast and said "Is that it?" I showed the person who requested the report how to run it and boxes appeared asking her to input the required course code and parameters. "What do I do?" she asked. "Just put in the codes you want and it will run," I said.

She did and the results came up with a list of students straight away. The room went into meltdown. They had literally never seen a query work so fast. "What if I want a list for a different course?" I was asked. "Just run it again but put in the course codes you want..." More amazement. By this time I was writing queries against the new software as well and had started to create a menu system for them using a MS Access/Visual Basic database-driven front end. I was somewhat amazed myself - not at what I could do, which I had been doing for years, but at all the missed opportunities the college had laboured under before.

As the weather improved lots of outdoor pursuits went on. The Floristry Department had an open day with staff and students creating all sorts of designs, displays, hats, parasols, wickerwork deer and so on.

The Admin Building from the Refectory. Unfortunately the amount of green space on campus would be diminished as new build continued. New laboratories, a new business and development building, a dedicated Higher Education building, a new student village with multiple residential blocks...

With residential students onsite at night there had to be suitable recreational facilities also. New sports halls and facilities went up, new gym staff eagerly demonstrated machinery to staff that made most of them blanch and at the sight of a pair of tongs that measured body fat content of bingo wings, they ensured that they wouldn't be over-run by staff flocking to avail themselves of their ministrations...

The photograph shows the on-site pub and club. Named the Stumble Inn it might perhaps have been better named Walk Inn, Stumble Out, but it provided a venue for students to hold quizzes and concert nights, play pool and table tennis etc.

It got to May and the Marketing and Quality Manager, Beryl phoned me to ask me to go into the Forest Walk at lunchtime to take photos of the display of bluebells. It was truly stunning.

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Network Course in Oxford

Sunday 6 - Tuesday 8 February 2000. Myself and Network Manager, Jayne are in Oxford for a two-day course on the new network system going into Myerscough College.

As the course is Monday - Tuesday, we have to drive down on Sunday afternoon and find the B&B then go into Oxford to find something to eat.

I always like a wander round a town or city at night, as floodlit buildings or even just lit shop windows create a totally different view than you would get in the daytime. This is Christ Church College.

Oxford has the oldest university in the English-speaking world. It came into being in the late 1100s though its relationship with the non-academic inhabitants was far from easy at first. In the background, turned blue by the approaching dusk is the Radcliffe Camera (built 1737-1748). It is not a camera, not even a camera obscura but a library. "Camera" in Latin means a room.

There's some little devils knocking about in Oxford after nightfall!

I found a Green Man carved on a bit of panelling. Looking not a little alarming himself, he was carved on the door underneath the squatting devil or imp pictured above.

Facing the Radcliffe library was this college building with a touch of the moorish above the wrought iron gates. The street lights threw shadows of the wrought ironwork onto the pillars within the gatehouse.

One of the most famous libraries in the world is Oxford's Bodleian Library. We passed under the archway and into it's courtyard. It is named after Sir Thomas Bodley who donated funds to develop a library dating from the 14th century.

It is the second largest UK library after the British Library and contains over 13 million books and documents. This is not the place to say "I can't remember the name or the author but the cover is red..."

I have a feeling that above the shop was a cafe or restaurant where we ate on at least one of the nights. Also note the row of parked bicycles. Oxford is full of them, either because students love to race around silently, startling each other and Oxford's inhabitants, or simply because the cost of parking in Oxford is so expensive that you may as well allow your car to be towed away and buy another, this being almost as "cheap"...

We found Oxford's Bridge of Sighs. Not quite so romantic, nor quite so well lit as its Venetian equivalent.

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Myerscough News Jan-Mar 2000

The year 2000 dawns. Everybody was raving about a new millenium. I was trying to say it was the final year of the old millenium. Nobody listened. At Myerscough College I was trying to make the website more interesting to prospective students and employers with staff who they might want to send on training courses.

At the same time I was creating for the first time an internal Intranet that could be accessed by both staff and students. Obviously the layers of public website, staff intranet and student intranet had to be kept secure from unauthorised access. Yet each had to have a consistent look and feel about them.

So I designed each page with a coloured strip down the left hand side. The public website had this brown strip, so beloved of my Deputy who said admiringly most days, "Can't you get rid of that sh***y brown stripe???" What? I was trying to use earth colours - it was a land-based college! Besides I thought it rather fetching...

The Student Intranet (also accessible by staff but not the public) had a green stripe - similar to the green on the college logo. Finally the Staff Intranet had a red stripe. Maybe not so much an earth colour, but the college's cars were mainly bright red so that's where that came from. And by looking at the colour of the stripe those people with access to all three levels could tell which one they were currently viewing.

I pestered all the departments for news and tried to put at least one new page up evey day on the public website.

The college had bought a second-hand Range Rover to use in training students how to safely tow horse boxes. These were the most favoured type of vehicles in use for that purpose and it was important to make courses as relevant to the out-of-college experience that most students would experience.

Also whilst on the topic of cars, this is the college's very own rally car. It was a Skoda Favorit and had been rebuilt to rally specification by the students in the college's Mechanisation Unit. They had won the Grizedale Rally a few weeks previously with it and BBC Radio Lancashire came to the college to interview one of the lecturing staff and to record the (rather disappointing) sound of the engine. Skoda Favorits don't generally have a throaty roar...

There was a period where the college seemed to be featuring regularly on TV and radio. The principal of the College, Professor John Moverley, was invited to participate in the 2020 Vision debate on issues affecting the North West region, which was part of the NWDA Regional Conference in Manchester. The debate was recorded by the BBC and was shown on the BBC2 Sunday political programme, North Westminster.

On February 8 2000 Professor Moverley was on BBC Radio Lancashire talking about issues facing rural communities and plugging the college's upcoming student careers advisory open days. The very next day he was at No.10 Downing Street for a meeting with the Prime Minister, Tony Blair and Minister of Agriculture, Nick Brown who later visited the college.

Later in February 2000 the college was featured on Granada TV's show Granada Tonight in a segment appropriately named Show Me the Ropes. Appropriate because reporter Simon O'Brien was shown ascending up into the canopy of one of the college's many trees to do a bit of pruning under the careful eye of Myerscough Arboriculture Instructor, Mick Cottam.

On 23 February 2000 presenter Rhodri Williams of TV's Animal Hospital came to film a segment about a rescued pot bellied pig called Rasher. Perhaps an unfortunate name for a pig, but she had been kept as a pet when small and cute, fed inumerable treats and then when she grew to adult size had been kept in less than ideal conditions in the garden of the house. Rasher, having been used to food treats whenever she wanted had grown a little belligerent at having a more suitable diet prescribed and entering her pen without a large board to keep between your legs and her teeth was something of a risk...

Early March 2000 and a number of bird cages appeared in the central corridor of the Plant Centre. They added movement and colour and interest to a visit, the Plant Centre being open to the public.

I kept thinking I must keep going in at dinner and attempt to teach them to say "Hello John!" Though to be honest I hadn't a clue as to whether they could learn to talk or not and remembering the choice language of a parrot in the Jamaica Inn on Bodmin Moor one time I decided to leave well enough alone... The last thing I needed was someone saying "I've seen John Burke talking to them a lot!"

The grain store. Or that's what it was on this day... There were plans to turn this into an exhibition centre. The amount of grain stored in the barn had gone steadily down since I started in October 1999.

A group of riders alongside the Plant Centre. This was a Sunday and I had gone into college in order to take a few photos of a dressage event that was taking place in the Equine Arena.

This was one of the contestants in the dressage event. Horses seldom used the I.T. equipment of the college so I didn't come into contact with them all that much and would have run a mile had I been offereed to climb on the back of one! Actually I did get the offer and whilst I may not have run a mile, I didn't take them up on their kind offer...

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Training in Cirencester, November 1999

Thursday 25 November 1999. For the moment I had done what I could for the I.T. network at Myerscough College and it was time to start to look at the Management Information System.

At Preston we had Femis software provided by EMIS, the company, with the data store running on Oracle. EMIS had been bought out, merged or otherwise acquired by Capita with the intention that all colleges using Femis would eventually move to their Dolphin software which, at Myerscough, used SQL*Server as a data store. SQL*Server still used the same SQL (Structured Query Language) as Oracle and also MS Access which I could use as a front end for running reports once I got my head around the Dolphin structure diagram. This latter looked a bit similar to the star charts used by the Millenium Falcon...

So this night I found myself staying at a tiny B&B in Cirencester where Capita had a training base. They didn't do evening meals so after the course finished on day one of two, I went into town to see what was available.

Well the Romans hadn't left much... By the time I got out of the course it was starting to go dark but there was just time for a quick look around the town. The first thing to catch the eye was the age of the buildings.

Cirencester has Roman roots and had an abbey built by the Normans and demolished by Henry VIII. The locals were not too sorry to see it go by all accounts as the Abbot dealt out severe punishments for petty crimes. In the Abbey Grounds a small section of the Roman Town Wall is preserved.

And elsewhere yet again - at the opposite end of the Abbey Grounds was the Norman arch that was the gateway to the Abbey. The Gatehouse was a small and picturesque 12th century building with heavy studded wooden doors. It is seen here from inside the grounds. Inside the arch were plaques on the passage walls.

One told us: The 12th century gate house, the only surviving building of the great Augustinian abbey of St. Mary, was one of the entrances to the precincts of the monastery until its dissolution in 1539. Purchased from Queen Elizabeth I By Dr. Richard Master, physician to the queen, the abbey site remained in the ownership of his descendants until 1954 when the gate house was presented to Cirencester in memory of the late Col. W.A. Chester Master by his family.

As it got darker, so I got hungrier. It would seem that nowhere opened until 6:30. The most likely looking place was The King's Head Hotel which had a few meals on the menu that sounded alright. I walked back to the B&B for a while and got some work done on the College's Intranet pages. I ventured out again at 7:00pm.

By now it had gone dark a bit more and I took another shot of the church, which is floodlit from the centre of the town square. The town had more or less gone to sleep and few people were about.

The receptionist of the King's Head told me that the restaurant was a carvery and I was looking forward to a meal as I walked through the ancient courtyard of the inn to the seperate building at the back. What's this? Only one other couple eating and in the bar, just two old men and a dog. And even the dog was asleep...

One of the men called out as I approached the empty bar: "She's gone to change a barrel - help yourself and get me a pint while you're at it!" It turned out to be a carvery with no roast... I had to make do with a chicken kiev, which although nice, was a bit of a let-down!

When I came out of the inn the night was black and still... (still what?) still black! If the town had gone to sleep before it was definitely snoring now! Even the teenagers were walking about in subdued groups. You might also notice that it was pouring with rain...

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Myerscough College Oct-Dec 1999

In October 1999 I was settling in at Myerscough College full time and getting to know people. My own team in I.T. was very small - a Network Manager and a technician.

We had a suite of three rooms - I shared one with the Network Manager without whom I would have gone swiftly insane - Jayne knew far more about networking than I did and it was the network that was the main source of discontent from the rest of the college. I don't know whether some of them thought I was coming in with a magic wand, but I literally had one member of staff full on in my face loudly saying how bad the system was and what was I going to do about it - on my third day there. He wouldn't let me finish a sentence and in the end I said "If you're not going to let me talk at all, you are going out the door!" He carried on just the same and I opened the door and just said in a very firm voice whilst looking him directly in the eyes, "Out!" then when he started again I shouted loud enough for everyone in the I.T. Centre to hear, "OUT! NOW!" Ten minutes afterwards an apology came in as an email but it wouldn't be the last time he acted like that.

The above photo was taken from one of the windows of the office (it was a corner office) and the tree on the path was a rare Canadian maple that a couple of years later had to be moved to allow the building of a new laboratory building. It was under a preservation order due to its rarity and couldn't just be cut down. We'll get to that in a future article.

It was a period of expansion for the college. New buildings were conceived, planned and built and during the three and a quarter years I was there the student numbers and built area of the campus probably doubled in size. I'm not claiming that was down to me, though the improvements to the website and network undoubtedly helped and even those were not down to me entirely either.

The building shown here was the new Animal Academy. Vet Nursing was taught here, there were animals - mainly rescue animals - of all sorts from tiny insects, hissing cockroaches which really did hiss(!) all the way up to a blooming massive Burmese python that was so large it could only be stretched full length in the corridor. It was pure muscle and immensely strong. It didn't mind being handled much, though you had to be careful if it was close to shedding its skin apparently. I wouldn't know - I had no intention of wondering where my scarf was and thinking that the snake would do instead... Again, we'll have a look inside in a future article.

It was amazing what weird and wonderful courses the college offered. Training drivers to drive safely and reverse with trailers and caravans was one, and caravan campsite management was another covering such things as underground cable laying, fire safety and all sorts of other stuff.

30 November 1999 - the sunset from the office window. We got some software to block certain websites as the Internet access had been completely open. More complaints: some of the students in the Equine Department were studying to go into the bookmaker gambling industry and needed to access gambling sites.

Fair enough, we had to work out how to open that access to a limited cohort of students, but then the most ridiculous complaint of all came from a member of staff who wanted to still be able to access adult websites... I remained adamant on that one and he blustered "Well, yes I can see why you might ban pornography but surely erotica is alright?"

Well..." I said calmly, "I'm fairly certain that it's not in your job description that you need to access it and I am not going to be put into the position of having to try to justify the difference between the two to a 16-year-old girl's parents." Request denied.

20 December 1999. Frost on the ground. Christmas break looming. New Year would be the year 2000. We had done all we could to check systems. The dread was that some remote computer that we didn't know about but in charge of something potentially essential and expensive to fix would go Pop! Service 99 years overdue - shutting down...

Just in case, I added some extra keys to my keyboard...

I came in one day to find some of the staff in fancy dress, ready for a Christmas lunch that the college was laying on for all staff. There were some complaints (not from these lovely ladies - fans of the band will recognise Miss Jeannie in the centre) that wine wouldn't be served but I was thinking that even being provided with a free meal would never have happened at any other place of work I'd been involved with!

My parents that Christmas got an extra surprise pressy... a pair of Myerscough green welly pen holders!

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