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This rite of a Washington spring is now 20 years old
Thursday was not like any other day this week–but it did fit into a pattern that set in starting in 2005. Meaning, I once again had no other choice but to take off work to go to the Washington Nationals’ home opener.
My first 15 years of life in and around the District did not include that rite of spring, because major-league baseball (as opposed to intern softball on the Mall) was an other-cities proposition. But I cleared my afternoon for the Nats’ home opener at RFK that April, and the experience was epically worth the work avoidance.
My wife and I have stayed in the same 20-game partial-season-ticket group ever since, so almost every March or April has treated us to this seasonal event.
Parts of it have changed immensely–especially with the team’s move from RFK and the peeling paint inside that concrete donut to Nats Park in 2008.
Where RFK had no neighborhood bars and restaurants for pregame and postgame enjoyment, the blocks north of Nats Park have filled in with residential, office and hotel buildings. To the south, D.C. has replaced the ugly metal hulk of the former Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge with the soaring arches of its successor over the Anacostia. And to the west, Audi Field hosts the other beautiful game as played by D.C. United and the Washington Spirit.
The neighborhood has overall improved so much since I was reviewing the occasional concert at the Capital Ballroom almost 30 years ago, and I love that.
Inside and just outside Nats Park, some traditions have held while others have flown in the breeze like the World Series championship flag that has graced our ballpark since 2019.
On one hand, hearing the aptly-named D.C. Washington sing the national anthem every year is a treat that fans of no other MLB franchise get. And no other team gets flyovers of F-16s from Joint Base Andrews.
On the other hand, I thought in 2005 that presidents throwing out a ceremonial first pitch would be a regular feature for Nats home openers. But after George W. Bush’s high strike in 2005 and Barack Obama’s comparable throw in 2010, other people have done the honors.
(Thursday featured Washington Post sports columnist Thomas Boswell, who has more than earned that recognition on his way to Cooperstown.)
I get that Joe Biden and Donald Trump don’t have the arms to keep the ball out of the dirt–and that Trump’s fragile ego couldn’t stand being booed by Nats fans who rightly disapprove of his authoritarian garbage–but we do need to bring that tradition back.
And, yes, the Nats have been wildly uneven in their home openers. Thursday was no exception, even between innings: MacKenzie Gore struck out 13 and allowed only one hit and zero walks in six innings, but then the Nats squandered that standout start to lose 7-3 to the Phillies.
That’s not a great beginning of the season. But I will, of course, be in the stands on Sunday.
#ballpark #baseball #firstPitch #flyover #homeOpener #MLB #Nationals #NationalsPark #Nats #NatsPark #openingDay #RFK #stadium #WashingtonNationals
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Weekly output: Most Innovative Companies, Serve Robotics, Android 17, United Airlines’ ambitions, Polymarket’s pop-up bar
CHICAGO–This is one of my favorite cities in the U.S., but it doesn’t show up in my work travel as often as I’d like. So I’m delighted that the Online News Association decided to move its annual conference from late summer to early spring and then stage this year’s event here–in a hotel that should be familiar to everybody who’s seen The Fugitive.
Patreon readers got a bonus post that I’d meant to have written weeks earlier: a recap of MWC Barcelona in which I also gave away a global eSIM to the first reader to ask for it.
3/24/2026: The most innovative robotics and engineering companies of 2026, Fast Company
This list, the product of months of research and editorial back-and-forth, finally emerged online this week. And then we had to run a quick correction after one of the companies honored said that we’d mentioned an achievement that they did not want disclosed.
3/25/2026: Delivery Robots Have a Mapping Problem, PCMag
I sat down in a hotel lobby in Austin during SXSW with MJ Burk Chun, co-founder and vice president of product and design at Serve Robotics, to talk about the issues that company is working to address as it tries to scale up having four-wheeled robots cart food deliveries to customers.
3/27/2026: Google Ships Latest Android 17 Beta. Here’s What’s New, PCMag
In between having so many longer stories to write, I was happy to get one that I could bang out in an hour or so.
3/28/2026: United’s New Upgrades Aim to Keep You Online and Fully Charged at 35,000 Feet, PCMag
My week started with me flying to another one of United’s hubs–with the airline covering my airfare and lodging–for its United Elevated event at LAX. In addition to looping me into UA’s ambitions for its onboard product, this event doubled as a reunion with some of the avgeek journalists I met at Cranky Dorkfest in September and with my former Washington Post colleague Lori Aratani, who interviewed United CEO Scott Kirby onstage Tuesday morning.
3/29/2026: Pints meet prop bets: Polymarket’s “Situation Room” pop-up bar in DC, Ars Technica
I thought I saw an opportunity to write for this occasional client for the first time since the summer of 2023; fortunately, my editor then and now agreed.
#AIMIntelligentMachines #Android17 #Austin #BostonDynamics #Chicago #deliveryRobots #Dexterity #ForwardXRobotics #GlacierRobotics #Infravision #LAX #LosAngeles #LucidBots #ONA #OnlineNewsAssociation #ORD #Polymarket #predictionMarkets #RobustAi #ServeRobotics #sxsw #Symbotic #TerabaseEnergy #UA #United #UnitedAirlines -
Weekly output: AT&T OneConnect, federal privacy fears, Artemis II, better inflight WiFi, 6G
This week started with me in Chicago for the Online News Association’s conference, then had a quick trip to Boston to see family for Easter, and tomorrow will have me off to San Francisco for the HumanX conference to lead two panels there.
I wrote an extra post Tuesday for Patreon readers recapping some scenes from SXSW, including a not-yet-campaign appearance by California governor Gavin Newsom and a stemwinder of a speech by Patreon founder Jack Conte on how human creativity can endure through the rise of AI.
3/31/2026: AT&T OneConnect Bundles Fiber, Wireless, Doesn’t Say What Mobile Service You Get, PCMag
I had just enough spare time at ONA to field this story–even factoring in time to try, without success, to get AT&T to explain just what wireless plan subscribers would get with this new offering.
4/1/2026: The One Thing Americans Can Agree On: The Feds Collect Too Much Personal Data, PCMag
I wrote up this study by the Center for Democracy & Technology a day after it was published Tuesday in part because I had nearly no free time on day two of ONA.
4/1/2026: NASA Launches Artemis II, Its First Moonshot Since 1972, PCMag
I watched the launch Wednesday evening of Artemis II with fingers crossed through main engine cutoff, then followed the first few hours of the mission while writing up this post. I updated the story a day later after the translunar injection burn of the Orion spacecraft’s service module engine committed astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen on a flight around the Moon and then back to Earth. I can’t wait to see this American and Canadian crew’s Earthrise photos.
4/2/2026: Fast, Free Wi-Fi Now Arriving at These Airlines, AARP
I showed up at my occasional client’s site not as a writer but as a subject-matter expert, courtesy of AARP writer Berit Thorkelson quizzing me over e-mail for this piece about how low-Earth-orbit satellite constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink are upgrading inflight WiFi.
4/3/2026: Unfortunately, It’s Time to Talk About 6G. Here’s What You Need to Know, PCMag
I got most of my reporting for this done at MWC Barcelona, but then needed a little more time to collect some industry insight about the wireless industry’s curious rush to hype 6G when so many of its customers are still trying to discern how 5G is supposed to make a noticeable difference in their everyday phone experience.
#6G #AmazonLeo #Artemis #ArtemisII #ATT #ATTBundle #ATTOneConnect #CDT #CenterForDemocracyTechnology #inflightWiFi #Integrity #lunarFlyby #moonshot #MWCBarcelona #nasa #Orion #SLS #SpaceLaunchSystem #StarlinkWiFi #surveillance -
First beach day of the year .
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#beachday #eastboston #boston -
First beach day of the year .
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#beachday #eastboston #boston -
First beach day of the year .
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#beachday #eastboston #boston -
First beach day of the year .
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#beachday #eastboston #boston -
First beach day of the year .
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#beachday #eastboston #boston -
RE: https://mstdn.social/@Rob_Bos/116532361556182970
#AI #SDLC #GitHubCopilot , sharing this more broadly
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RE: https://mstdn.social/@Rob_Bos/116532361556182970
#AI #SDLC #GitHubCopilot , sharing this more broadly
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RE: https://mstdn.social/@Rob_Bos/116532361556182970
#AI #SDLC #GitHubCopilot , sharing this more broadly
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RE: https://mstdn.social/@Rob_Bos/116532361556182970
#AI #SDLC #GitHubCopilot , sharing this more broadly
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RE: https://mstdn.social/@Rob_Bos/116532361556182970
#AI #SDLC #GitHubCopilot , sharing this more broadly
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🚨 Gary O’Neill under consideration for shock return to Wolves after Vitor Pereira exit. #Boro boss Rob Edwards another prominent candidate; would need compensation but strong connection with #WWFC. Carrick & others also discussed internally @[email protected] https://nytimes.com/athletic/67704…
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Weekly output: tech for creators, Xfinity Mobile plans, how 1Password eyes AI, cheaper NextGen TV tuners
This coming week will not be like the last six and change because my calendar has me sleeping in my own bed every night. That is an exciting prospect after a string of trips that took me to Austin, L.A., Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, San Jose and Las Vegas… but this workweek isn’t free of travel, as I’m taking a day trip to NYC for Uber’s Go-Get press event Wednesday.
4/21/2026: Out and About with Jefferson and Jules, NAB Show
I went to the National Association of Broadcasters’ conference for the first time since 2015 for about the same reason as that previous trip: speaking on a panel. This one featured my former USA Today colleague Jefferson Graham and travel journalist Juliana Broste (the last name rhymes with “frosty”) talking about the tools they use to take and share photos and videos from interesting places. Having two people well-versed in speaking on camera on the same stage made my job as a panel moderator easy.
4/22/2026: Comcast Adds 2 Premium Xfinity Mobile Plans With Global Roaming Included, PCMag
This post was kind of a disaster, in that Comcast’s embargoed press release left out important details about these new plans and then my PR contact provided also-unhelpful answers to my questions. After seeing the details of these plans Wednesday morning, I rewrote a large chunk of the post from the United lounge at LAS before boarding my flight out of Vegas.
4/23/2026: 1Password sees AI as both threat and tool, Fast Company
I interviewed 1Password’s new chief technology officer Nancy Wang in the speaker lounge at HumanX in San Francisco as that room was getting closed down at the end of that conference. I did not write up the interview that night, as I was meeting an old friend for dinner, and then did not get around to writing the story on the flight home.
4/24/2026: NextGen TV Backers Aim to Advance the Standard With Cheaper Converter Boxes, PCMag
I returned to the topic of this upgrade to broadcast TV (also known as “ATSC 3.0”) for the first time since 2024 (I think) to cover an initiative aired at NAB to lower the cost of watching NextGen TV broadcasts on sets without compatible tuners. Most new TVs still fall under that description, which is not something I would have predicted four years ago.
#1Password #AI #ATSC30 #broadcastTV #Comcast #JeffersonGraham #JulianaBroste #NAB #NABShow #NancyWang #NationalAssociationOfBroadcasters #NextGenTV #OTATV #TVConverterBoxes #vibeCoding #XfinityMobile -
@siracusa I imagine the quantity and quality of feedback are inversely proportionate. In the beginning you have scrappy users who write good reports with valuable information. These days it would probably be 1,000/sec of MY BOSS SAYS I NEED TO JOIN THE #corp-bullshit CHANNEL BUT I DON'T SEE IT PLZ HLP.
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@siracusa I imagine the quantity and quality of feedback are inversely proportionate. In the beginning you have scrappy users who write good reports with valuable information. These days it would probably be 1,000/sec of MY BOSS SAYS I NEED TO JOIN THE #corp-bullshit CHANNEL BUT I DON'T SEE IT PLZ HLP.
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@siracusa I imagine the quantity and quality of feedback are inversely proportionate. In the beginning you have scrappy users who write good reports with valuable information. These days it would probably be 1,000/sec of MY BOSS SAYS I NEED TO JOIN THE #corp-bullshit CHANNEL BUT I DON'T SEE IT PLZ HLP.
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@siracusa I imagine the quantity and quality of feedback are inversely proportionate. In the beginning you have scrappy users who write good reports with valuable information. These days it would probably be 1,000/sec of MY BOSS SAYS I NEED TO JOIN THE #corp-bullshit CHANNEL BUT I DON'T SEE IT PLZ HLP.
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@siracusa I imagine the quantity and quality of feedback are inversely proportionate. In the beginning you have scrappy users who write good reports with valuable information. These days it would probably be 1,000/sec of MY BOSS SAYS I NEED TO JOIN THE #corp-bullshit CHANNEL BUT I DON'T SEE IT PLZ HLP.
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With his son in a recovery facility, a father is pushing for more long-term help – Boston 25 News
WORCESTER, Mass. — For Todd Miller, giving up on his son is not an option. His son Nick…
#NewsBeep #News #Mentalhealth #boston_25 #Health #lisa_gresci #Massachusetts #MentalHealth #michelle_reiner #miller #Nick #nick_reiner #Rob #todd_miller #UK #UnitedKingdom #video #Worcester
https://www.newsbeep.com/uk/562823/ -
With his son in a recovery facility, a father is pushing for more long-term help – Boston 25 News
WORCESTER, Mass. — For Todd Miller, giving up on his son is not an option. His son Nick…
#NewsBeep #News #Mentalhealth #AU #Australia #boston_25 #Health #lisa_gresci #Massachusetts #MentalHealth #michelle_reiner #miller #Nick #nick_reiner #rob #todd_miller #Video #Worcester
https://www.newsbeep.com/au/645427/ -
Sometimes I can make an expensive hardware purchase quickly
I won’t say that I always research potential purchases to an obsessive degree, because first I’d have to fact-check that statement by researching my Web history to an obsessive degree. But I can say with reasonable certainty that I usually don’t buy anything with a four-figure price without first reading more than one review of the device in question.
Except when I don’t, which this week started with my plucking a jar of leftover bacon fat (what, you don’t have one?) out of the fridge and realizing it was not quite its usual cold self.
I grabbed our ThermoWorks remote infrared thermometer (what, you don’t have one?) and realized that our barely 10-year-old Samsung had developed a series of microclimates–warmer at the top, normally-cold temps at the bottom–that should not exist in a functioning refrigerator.
The French-door model we’d bought at the end of 2014 after extensive reading of Wirecutter and Consumer Reports review had already been aging badly, like those of other Samsung purchasers. The front-door icemaker had stopped working a couple of years ago even as the fridge had started growing icebergs at the bottom and back of its refrigerator compartment.
Instead of paying for yet another repair that would push off this decision, one longer-term risk and one short-term factor pushed me to pick a replacement.
First, Trump’s tariff schemes already look to be making a lot of household appliances more expensive. I suppose they might miraculously inspire trade deals that leave imports cheaper–but after all the opening economic chaos of this administration, why would I want to take avoidable financial chances on the tumbling Trump dice?
Second, Bosch held a sale. I’d already been thinking of that company as a possibility after months of satisfactory experience with the Bosch dishwasher and induction range we got as part of last year’s overdue kitchen renovation, and a hands-on inspection of that German firm’s latest hardware at CES 2025 gave me a little more confidence.
And that steered my choice of which fridge to get, even with inexact advice from reviewers.
Consumer Reports’ guidance was a little behind, while Wirecutter’s advice focused on fridges without in-door icemakers. And neither had reviewed the Bosch model I had in mind. But CR’s owner-satisfaction metrics revealed long-term confidence in Bosch’s work that was not matched in reader assessments of LG and Whirlpool, two other brands I’d considered.
So I went ahead with the purchase–after first chiseling away at our costs by buying some AARP-discounted Best Buy gift cards–and now I can look forward to the results being delivered and set up next weekend. I hope that they live up to my expectations, at least enough to make me not regret this post in a year or five or 10.
I also hope that our car can hold out until 2026, because after also having our house’s roof replaced, we’ve spent quite enough on household capital expenditures this year.
#applianceReviews #appliances #Bosch #capex #capitalExpenditures #ces #fridge #LG #refrigerator #Samsung #TrumpTariffs #TrumpUncertainty #Whirlpool
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Recent Readings–Another Severe Case, per The Times; Guardian’s Take on “Brain Retraining”; Boston Globe’s Long COVID Tale
By David Tuller, DrPH
Times coverage of another severe patient
On February 15th, The Times covered the case of yet another patient with severe illness. The article, by health editor Eleanor Hayward, bore the headline “My body can take no more, says ME patient starving in hospital.” The subhead: “Campaigners say the suffering of Savannah Victora-May, 23, highlights NHS inaction over recommendations that it set up specialist services for severe cases.”
Victoria-May has been at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in southeast London for close to a year. The case has drawn the attention of Action for ME and other patient advocates. In December of 2024, a coroner in Exeter published what is called a “report to prevent future deaths” after an inquest into the case of Maeve Boothby O’Neill, a severe ME patient.
Boothby O’Neill, 27, died in 2021 of malnutrition after three hospital stays failed to halt her deterioration. The report to prevent future deaths included an appeal for specialist ME/CFS services.
Per The Times: “Victora-May is unable to eat or drink and is in severe pain, drifting in and out of consciousness. She has lost 30kg since her admission in March and has eaten nothing since January 18…Speaking from hospital via a friend, Victora-May described the pain as ‘like being lowered into a bath of acid and the acid rating gets turned up more and more every half hour.’”
The Canary, a scrappy muckraking publication, has also covered the situation. A petition has been posted on change.org. According to the UK’s ME Association, Tessa Hunt, a member of parliament, mentioned the case in recent public comments regarding the lack of specialist services.
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Non-triumphalist story about “brain retraining” for ME/CFS in Guardian
Stories about so-called “brain retraining” programs for chronic illness are often triumphalist narratives about full recovery after a few sessions of whatever—the Lightning Process or the Gupta Program or this or that. This week, The Guardian published something a bit different on ME/CFS and these mind-body approaches. The author, Hermione Hoby, is a British journalist who now lives in Boulder, Colorado, and she paints a more nuanced, thought-provoking account of her experience.
The headline: “My maddening battle with chronic fatigue syndrome: ‘On my worst days, it feels almost demonic.’” Subhead: “I suffered with my mystery illness for decades before gaining a diagnosis. Could retraining my brain be the answer?” (In the end, the answer was no, although it appeared to Hopy to have helped for a while.)
The writing is lovely—wry and elegant, moving but not maudlin, ironic and self-aware. Hoby keenly describes her discontent with clinical encounters:
“The experience went like this: a doctor would glance at the blood test results in his or her (but usually his) hands and tell me I was fine. They’d tend to avoid my eyes as they said this. My test results were indeed fine, and so were my vitals, more or less (lowish blood pressure), but the situation clearly was not. One doctor told me to eat vegetables. When I managed to mumble that I did eat vegetables, this doctor slightly smirked as she said: “Yeah, but do you really?””
After many years, Hoby received an ME/CFS diagnosis. Her illness followed a fluctuating pattern—long periods of apparently full recovery followed by serious relapses lasting weeks or months, for no discernible reason. Boulder is a leading center of “woo-woo”—Hoby’s word, although I concur about Boulder—and she ended up seeing a brain-retraining practitioner.
His strategy included watching “messianically positive video testimonials” in which “men and women avowed the miraculous effects of brain retraining”–and it seemed to work. Hoby improved dramatically. As she writes:
“There followed a period of quasi-religious mania. I was cured! (!!!) I began referring to my ME/CFS in the past tense and applying the principles of brain retraining to other areas of my life. Finding myself running further and faster, and writing with more ease, I felt superheroic. My husband, delighted to see me well, also became a little wary around me, as if I might take the mind-over-matter credo to the point of attempting to walk through walls.”
Then she crashed again—forcing her to reassess her views and navigate complicated feelings about the whole matter. Definitely worth a read.
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Boston Globe offers in-depth look at life with Long COVID
The Boston Globe has published a detailed and heartbreaking story a detailed and heartbreaking account about Samantha Crausman, a young Massachusetts woman who has suffered with prolonged symptoms since a 2022 bout of COVID-19. The headline: “A doctor watches his 28-year-old daughter suffer from long COVID. He clings fiercely to hope.”
The article, by long-time health reporter Felice Freyer, doesn’t break a lot of new ground. However, it offers an in-depth look at multiple aspects of living with Long COVID, especially the ME/CFS subtype. Freyer covers the skepticism of medical professionals toward patients, the extreme measures families pursue to protect loved ones from further infection, the desperate search for any and every possible treatment, the sense of living in perpetual limbo.
Rob Crausman, Samantha’s father, is a lung specialist and has practiced medicine for decades. He has been dismayed at how the medical field has mishandled the illness that has so disrupted his daughter’s life. Per the Globe:
“He never imagined his profession could so completely fail his own child at her time of greatest need.“‘I’m profoundly disappointed,’ he said.
“To this day, he gets well-meaning advice from physician friends who show surprising ignorance about his daughter’s condition.
“‘If I have one more person tell me that she just needs to do yoga, I will lose my mind,’ he said.”
(View the original post at virology.ws)
#LongCovid #TheTimes -
TAPESTRY
Nina Bell Mysteries #1
Nina’s boyfriend tries to rob her of the $10K she’s delivering to her boss. When her boss winds up dead, Nina has to deal with love, lust, theatre, rock ‘n roll – and murder before the killer decides she’s expendable.Digital edition $4.99
Print edition $13.99
#NinaBellMysteries #Tapestry #DevonEllington #Mystery #Retro #Love #Lust #Theatre #RockNRoll #Murder #ChickLit #NYCUBL: https://books2read.com/u/mdEXwX
Nina Bell website: https://ninabellmysteries.devonellingtonwork.com
