Reading my old Usenet postings has brought up the old saying that I’ve forgotten more than I know. It seems that there was once this young female programmer who understood Macintosh Apple Events and Microsoft DDE, used something called VROOOM Overlays (a memory manager for DOS programs), and knew the difference between resistive, capacitive, and inductive digitizers used in pen computers. But she couldn’t figure out how to install RAM on a Powerbook 500 or get her cat to stop chewing on plastic bags so I suppose she didn’t know everything.

Writing messages and drawing designs on cookies has become easier thanks to edible food coloring markers. “FooDoodlers permit food decorators to draw directly upon foods with pens utilizing various colors of edible food inks.”

The NY Times has a poignant piece on electronic remembrances of September 11 victims. Friends and relatives have carefully saved final emails and instant messages from those lost. A lawyer who would’ve been in Tower 1 if he had not been late for work published the archive of messages from his Blackberry handheld device which chronicles 14 hours of frantic messages as colleagues attempt to ascertain each other’s whereabouts. The deep horror of that day comes through in 91 short emails.

The cat was mewling piteously the other day and I said “she sounds like a siren. Hey, did the Sirens have names?” Away we went to the Internet to find a page on the mythology of the Sirens. There are conflicts as to their names and number, but here are the most common names: Aglaophonos: one of brilliant voice, Thelxepeia: one who uses words to enchant, Peisino‘: the persuasive one, and Molpe: one with song. Good thing the cat already has a name.

ENIAC programmer Betty Holberton died on December 8th. She contributed not only to the war effort, COBOL, and FORTRAN, but also made computers easier to use for programmers (and everyone else too). “Grace Hopper later described Betty Holberton as being the best programmer she had ever known.”

A reader sent in an update on the Swedish ultrasound study which quotes the Vice President of the Australian Medical Association. He says that the study is flawed since it only included men whose mothers had ultrasounds in the 1970’s when they were only used for high-risk pregnancies. He also quibbled with the association between left-handedness and brain damage.

The SF Chronicle rounds up more information on the business of cell phone ring tones. EMI Music Publishing has banned the ring-tone versions of 300 songs while two rappers have been amongst the first to release new record tracks as ring-tones. These personalized rings are catching on fast in the U.S. with Cingular, AT&T; Wireless, VoiceStream and Sprint ready to sell cell tones. But, thanks to EMI, it looks like cell-toting fans of “The X-Files,” “Star Trek” and “Buffy” won’t be able to go legal ringing their theme songs.

Great Performances’ Art of the Violin airs on PBS stations this month. The website has interesting tidbits including an interview with Hilary Hahn and a Flash depiction of the internals of a violin. The program’s archival footage of violinists such as Fritz Kreisler and Yehudi Menuhin should be of great interest to those who have surmised about their technique by listening to recordings, but never actually seen it.

Although AT&T; Broadband Internet swiftly transferred our service over to their own networks, our cable modem has regularly stopped working each evening for anywhere from one to “I don’t know because I fell asleep while I was on hold with tech support and when I woke up the sun was shining and it was working again” hours. When it is working, our speeds are one third of what we used to get. I expected glitches, and some is better than none, but I hope they are intending to make things much better, not just tolerable.

Aerie Networks, who acquired the remains of Metricom’s Ricochet assets, has plans to launch wireless broadband service early next year. One way they are running their business smarter: “To avoid the $4 to $10 fees Metricom paid on each pole-top transmitter, Aerie is negotiating with municipalities to exchange free service for pole space.” (via RandomWalks)