The significance of April 15 this year didn’t involve filing my taxes, thanks to the IRS moving back the deadline to May 17. Instead, Thursday happened to be the 10th anniversary of my last day of work at the Washington Post. Looking that up made me realize that I’d never quite decided when my freelance existence began, but now I know: April 29, the date of my resignation from the paper after the two weeks of vacation time I took following that final Friday in the newsroom.

4/14/2021: Here’s how AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile slice and dice 5G plans and pricing, Light Reading

This is my first post for a new client–thanks to an old editor working there. Freelancers, remember to be nice to your editors. Readers, give Mike Dano a follow on Twitter if you want to stay current about the wireless business.

4/14/2021: The Rise of Digitalization & Mobile Apps: Travelling Smarter and Safer, Seatrade Cruise Virtual

I was going to have a panel at this cruise-ship conference on my calendar last spring, but then the pandemic sank those plans. Instead, the event resurfaced as an online gathering, at which my role was to interview three executives at cruise lines–Jay Schneider of Royal Caribbean Group, Scott Piccolo of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings, and Luca Pronzati of MSC Cruises–as well as Greg Ross-Munro, CEO of the app-development firm (and panel sponsor) Sourcetoad. We had a good conversation about the design principles that go into cruise-ship apps and where these folks think the industry is heading with them.

4/15/2021: RootMetrics 5G report puts AT&T in first place, Light Reading

RootMetrics PR gave me an advance on their latest report on 5G network performance, which I then wrote up for my new trade-pub client. Lesson re-learned from this: Always read through to the end of a study to see where they tested, which in this case was a grab-bag of mostly medium and small cities.