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.

Work Index