An already-busy week got busier when a staff writer at one of my clients was out sick for a couple of days.

9/13/2021: Charter CFO scolds programmers for cost inflation, FierceVideo

“It is a prisoner’s dilemma”: Charter chief financial officer Chris Winfrey concisely summed up the problem of individual programmers all thinking that they can keep spending other people’s money even as those other people keep cutting the cord to flee rate hikes. He said that in an interview at a Bank of America Securities online conference that I wrote up for my trade-pub client on short notice after their intended writer fell under the weather.

9/14/2021: AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile try to fuel 5G by fostering startups, Light Reading

After months of carrier hype about the 5G startups they were incubating and promoting, I checked in with a couple of industry analysts who provided about the same verdict: 5G remains a couple of upgrades away from being able to support the sort of products and services you might actually call game-changing.

9/14/2021: Comcast CFO warns of ‘a little bit of a slowdown’, FierceVideo

I wrote up another cable CFO’s appearance at the BofA Securities conference, in this case Comcast’s Mike Cavanagh.

9/15/2021: iPhone 13 deals: Here are best trade-in offers from AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, USA Today

This column required some corrections to fix mistakes I left in my copy–in one case, Apple had the wrong price listed on its site, but the others were all my fault. I am going to try to ensure that my next column for USAT will not involve any math.

9/16/2021: Microsoft offers passwordless logins, Al Jazeera

I talked to the Arabic-language news channel about Microsoft’s new offer of no-password-required authentication and why people might want to take the company up on that.

9/17/2021: S01 E09 – SmartTechCheck Podcast by Parks Associates, Mark Vena

I rejoined my usual podcast pals Mark Vena, John Quain and Stewart Wolpin to unpack the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch news from Apple’s Tuesday event.