I have to remind myself that I’m not imagining things through a haze of jet lag: The Washington Nationals really did win the National League Championship Series with a 4-0 sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals (revenge for 2012!), and a D.C. baseball team will play in the World Series for the first time since 1933. Eighty-six years!

I watched game four of the NLCS from 6,700-plus miles away on my laptop–first in my hotel room, then the CEATEC press room. I can only imagine what the other journalists there thought of my demeanor, which went from “staring a hole into my laptop’s screen” as the Cards loaded the bases in the top of the 8th to absolute elation as the last pitch of the game landed in Victor Robles’s glove and the Nats rushed onto the field to celebrate.

Now we just need to win four more games. Go Nats!

10/19/2019: Here’s what it feels like to sprout an extra pair of robot arms, Fast Company

I knew that one of the keynotes on CEATEC’s opening day would spotlight ANA’s ventures into telepresence avatars. I didn’t expect one of these experiments to take the form of a set of remote-controlled arms that a person could wear while another operated those appendages–or that I’d get a chance to strap on that Fusion rig myself. This was a fun piece to write.

10/20/2019: Too-smart toilets and work-tracking shirts: Could this tech in Tokyo come to the U.S.?, USA Today

What CEATEC lacked in shipping or soon-to-ship products, it made up in a sort of science-fair weirdness. I tried to capture that in this show recap/photo gallery I filed Thursday night in Tokyo. The piece could have been considerably longer… but I get paid a fixed rate per USAT column, so writing long only drives down my per-word rate.