I joined the Department of Chemical Engineering in March 96 as a Senior Computing Technician (T4). I was promoted to Computer Officer grade III in July 96, and then to Computer Officer grade II in January 98. The Computing Section of the Department of Chemical Engineering consists of three people, a Computer Officer grade I, a Computer Officer grade II and a Computer Officer grade III. It is our collective responsibility to provide a service to all members of the department under the direction of the Computer Officer grade I.
I am System Administrator of the Department's Novell Fileserver which includes the day to day running of the system and recovery from disasters, and installation and evaluation of new software. It also involves liaison with University and College computing officers so as to provide a service to Chemical Engineering students in their colleges. I am also required to give instruction to the undergraduate intake on the use of the departmental computer systems and provide support for teaching and administrative staff and students on PC and Macintosh hardware and software.
I am responsible for the development and maintenance of the Department's World Wide Web site which is now an essential part of the Department's advertisement strategy for the recruitment of undergraduate students and research students.
November 1995 - December 1995
Contracts
During these two months I undertook two short term contracts. One, for Cimage Enterprises in Bracknell, was a comparison of paper and online documentation for software. The other, for Undersea Technologies, was the production of online training and presentation material.
August 1994 - September 1995
Cambridge University, Departments of Archaeology
and Engineering
During this year I worked on three Computer Aided Learning projects as part of the TLTP (Teaching and Learning Technology Program) initiative. All were short term contracts.
In the Department of Engineering, I worked on the Interact Project which uses the World Wide Web to bring computer simulations into teaching. In Archaeology I developed two modules, one to teach the principles of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) to archaeology undergraduates and one on human remains.
October 1993 - June 1994
Geospace Consultancy Services Ltd,
Hailes House, 32, Hailes Avenue, Edinburgh, EH13 0LZ
Geospace specialised in ground penetrating radar
surveying for civil engineering and archaeological applications.
I was involved with data collection, image processing and image interpretation.
I worked on projects as diverse as a
Bronze Age crannog in Loch Tay, an 18th century canal, and locating
utilities prior to building work in Berlin.
In July, 1994, Geospace went into liquidation.
October 1990 - September 1993
SERC studentship
In 1990, I was awarded a SERC SBAC (Science and Engineering Research Council, Science Based Archaeology Committee) studentship, initially tenable at Staffordshire Polytechnic. In May 1991, I transferred to Heriot-Watt, where I gained an MPhil. I developed a system which uses ray tracing techniques from computer graphics to simulate side scan sonar images. The program was written in C, on Unix machines.
May 1989 - September 1990
McDonnell Douglas Information Systems Ltd, Cambridge
I joined McDonnell Douglas in the middle of a large development project to add GIS (Geographic Information System) capability to GDS (Graphic Design System). As one of the team developing the module, I worked in FORTRAN on Prime and Vax machines. I also implemented FORTRAN and C code in a Unix environment. Much of the later work used Vaxstations equipped with XWindows.
June 1987 - March 1989
Carmellan Research Ltd, 11 Hillside Close, Ellington, Huntingdon
The primary activity of Carmellan Research is the development and use of closed circuit rebreathing equipment. My work included a wide variety of projects, such as marine archaeological and biological surveys, photogrammetric surveys of process plant, aerial photomosaics and CAD consultancy. I was also responsible for the company's marketing. My programming experience was used to maintain the PC-based software used by the company for decompression calculations and photogrammetric analysis.
September 1979 - June 1987
CADCentre Ltd, High Cross, Madingley Road, Cambridge
CADCentre (now Aveva) is a major British engineering software supplier, specialising in CAD/CAM packages. I gained a wealth of programming experience, covering a wide range of areas -including database applications and the use of graphics. Most of this experience was on PRIME computers using FORTRAN. I was also involved in writing the user manuals, and giving demonstrations to potential clients.
In March 1986, I moved to the marketing department of the Process Industries Division. There, I was responsible for the production of brochures, newsletters, advertising and PR.