Once again, the Nationals are headed to the postseason. Since our last two bouts of October baseball ended badly–the excruciating game 5 of the 2012 NLDS still haunts me–and the team has gotten whacked with injuries lately, I’m not super-optimistic about this one. Fortunately, I have the election to distract me by providing an alternate source of stress.

9/26/2016: How HP’s decision to reject some ink cartridges reflects a much bigger problem, Yahoo Finance

First I thought this post would be a great opportunity to use a still image of the printer-execution scene from “Office Space,” then I realized there was a good point to be made about the risks of using automatic security updates to deal with business-model problems. Two days later, HP confessed that it “should have done a better job of communicating” about the software update that disabled some third-party ink cartridges and said it would provide an optional patch to disable the offending feature.

9/27/2016: Here’s the cybersecurity debate Clinton and Trump should have had, Yahoo Finance

I wrote a quick recap of the cybersecurity issues that Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump could have gone over during Monday’s debate. Will these topics get a reasoned discussion during the two other debates? I’m going to say no.

9/29/2016: Media Panel, Business Access Media

My role in this conference for business-school PR and communications types was to speak briefly about what I cover, then answer questions from attendees. As the one freelancer speaking, I could offer a different perspective than my fellow panelists, all full-time staff: Economist finance editor Tom Easton, the BBC’s Anthony Zurcher, CNN national correspondent Ryan Nobles and Marketplace Radio education reporter Amy Scott.

(Zurcher and I not only went to Georgetown, the conference venue, but worked together at the Georgetown Voice. You can imagine my disappointment that nobody in the audience asked “how did you all get into journalism?”)

10/2/2016: Why you may be able to finally ditch that old unlimited plan, USA Today

Right after my editor asked me to revisit this question, I had two different people show per-app data usage details on their iPhones that had not been reset since 2013, making them useless for getting a sense of how much data they should get. Apple, please fix that feature so the count resets once a month.

10/2/2016: Why the chip card isn’t the disaster everybody says it is, Yahoo Finance

I don’t know if I’m going to convince anybody with this, but the small extra wait to have an EMV chip-card payment read–far less time than I lose to checkout lines–doesn’t bother me much. I do, however, appreciate being able to pay with plastic overseas without getting funny looks or (most of the time) having my card rejected by a ticket-vending machine.