I carry no phone An aspiring Luddite In a wired world.	Jeff Berry is an early adopter of the Internet and the Web, a late adopter of Twitter, and declines to adopt Facebook. With the death of Google+, he's experimenting with federated platforms . He admins a medievalist Mastodon instance, and can found on the PlusPora diaspora pod. He hates cell-phones.

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Southern Reboot Ah Spring! When a not-so-young man's fancy turns lightly toward re-entering the workforce. In our case, this included a relocation to where the job is. So it was that we packed our worldly goods onto a truck and set off. (Well, our goods were packed onto a truck, how much of that we did is questionable.) The job itself is in Cambridge, at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit of the Medical Research Council. Once again, I shall be pursuing my métier - running computers for scientists. However, Cambridge housing being what it is, we chose to live a bit further away, in Norfolk, giving me a half-hour commute on the train. My start date came hard on the heels of a longish trip to the States to get my visa sorted, followed by an SCA event at which we stepped down from a couple of offices, which was, in turn, followed by a short trip to Ireland. In the middle of which, we moved. Those trials over, I took the train into Cambridge on a Monday morning, leaving plenty of time to walk to the site from the train station. The last leg of my walk was along Vicar's Brook, just north of Chaucer Road, and I had some time before I was due to arrive. So I sat down on a bench for a few moments, while the cows walked around me. Yes, here I was less then a mile from the Fitzwilliam Museum, on a tributary of the River Cam - over which there is a bridge, I understand - surrounded by cows. Friendly cows. One of them kept pushing his head at me like a cat wanting to be scratched. I wouldn't have minded, except for the horns. Walking to work at a high-tech research institute through a herd of cows is utterly charming. It is not simply a delightful juxtaposition of rural and urban, but it is also a reminder that despite all our technology - our phones, our email, our HPC clusters - we live in a physical world, a world where daily I face the choice of watching my step or cleaning cow poop off my shoes. It reminds me as well of the larger systems which keep the planet healthy, and which we neglect at our peril. It also a window into the past, for those with the eyes to see. This bit of green space, Coe Fen and New Bit, is common land (like the Midsummer Common, overseen by the Friends of Midsummer Common). According to the Friends, the Commons Registration Act of 1965 grants commoners dwelling in Cambridge the right to graze "Cows, geldings and mares to a total of 20 beasts" on Coe Fen and New Bit from April to November, a tradition which dates back in some form to at least the 12th century. The area was also used for the milling of grain in the Anglo-Saxon period. Luddite'sLog, 16 June 2016 © 2016 Jeff Berry

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