Each member of the California State Bar Association (which is a state entity) has a number, and the Bar’s website lets you search by number or by name. Barrister No. 1 was William Harrison Waste, admitted in June 1894. The highest number is 237747, belonging to Rex John Phillips, admitted in September 2005. You might ask, how long has it taken for the roster to double? Easy: look up barrister #118874, Andrew Henry Milinkevich, admitted in July 1985.
Gratitude to Perry Metzger for a twenty-minute phone call: my Linux box is now transferring /home/anton to the new Mac Mini with scp.
Later: Apparently /home/anton/.Trash contained a recursive link; the copy of my home directory ended up nine times as big as the original. And I can’t delete the lump, because its owner is wheel, an account which I did not create and whose password I therefore do not know. Does MacBSD as preinstalled have a superuser account with a standard password?
Later still: Perry to the rescue again (he saw this post!). I needed to say sudo bash rather than su. Twenty-seven gigabytes of color glossy emptiness have appeared.
I bought a Mac Mini today. What’s recommended reading for someone coming back to the Mac universe after a long absence? (My other computers run Red Hat 9 and MacOS 8.1.)
Monday: I bought David Pogue’s Missing Manual. It appears to be about twice as dense as its competitors.
Larry Elder lists some policies that harm people of color, sometimes intentionally.
Thirty-odd years ago I read Alvin’s Secret Code by Clifford B. Hicks (1963), which begins when a puzzling telegram falls into the hands of two boys. The only sentence in it that makes any kind of sense to them is “Ivan hiding message oak,” so they look in a hollow oak tree but find nothing. They take the telegram to a retired spy, who explains that it is in a commercial code which, as luck would have it, he devised; “Ivan hiding message oak” means “Jones arriving Blanksville Wednesday.”
Now I learn from Kahn’s The Code-Breakers that, in the jargon of the Russian Communist underground, dubok ‘little oak’ meant a hiding-place for messages. Hmmm.
Because of Hugh Laurie, I watched the first episode of House, M.D., and that was enough: if the premiere is so formulaic (mysterious and scary illness, misdiagnosis, misdiagnosis, affirmation of the value of human life, intuitive leap, happy ending) there’s little hope. Laurie, a brilliant comedian, deserves better material; I trust he is “crying all the way to the bank.” (Who coined that phrase?)