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Happy Birthday Alan!
A short birthday greeting sent to a friend, wishing him a great day on the golf course and looking forward to seeing him in a few weeks.
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Baby Steps to Healthcare Reform
Three concise healthcare reform proposals are offered — eliminating pre-existing condition exclusions, allowing insurers to sell across all US markets, and adopting a loser-pays malpractice standard — with particular emphasis on how loser-pays would curb frivolous suits and the hidden costs of defending dropped claims.
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Fail2ban on Leopard Server
Getting fail2ban running on Mac OS X Leopard Server required several workarounds — a launchd plist to create a missing run directory, tweaks to the ipfw action module, and a custom filter for bots hammering nonexistent URLs — all of which are documented and shared.
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VoodooPad Pro Blogging
A complete workflow is documented for using VoodooPad as a static-site CMS, combining Lua script plugins, a web export plugin, and shell scripts to handle file organization, sitemap generation, Atom feed creation, and URL correction, with a sample project package included.
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Amavisd settings
Spam with malformed MIME boundaries was bypassing SpamAssassin on an OS X Server mail setup and reaching recipients unscored, and changing the Amavisd final_bad_header_destiny setting from D_PASS to D_REJECT is proposed as the fix.
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Nationalized Healthcare and the Free Market
A scenario is laid out in which nationalized healthcare arrives not through legislation but through a government-sponsored insurance option so much cheaper than private plans that employers adopt it by default, eventually leaving physicians and hospitals with a de facto single payer.
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Appendiceal Duplication
An unusual operative case is described in which a patient with classic appendicitis signs was found intraoperatively to have an appendiceal duplication — a rare anomaly confirmed on pathology — with the perforated duplicate forming a phlegmon and a relatively normal true appendix discovered just before closure.
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iCal – Exchange Time Zone Fix – Chapter 3
The iCal-Invite-Fix AppleScript was updated to support multiple Exchange servers in a single script by using two paired list properties that map Exchange TZID fragments to the correct iCal time zone identifiers.
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General Surgery in NY
Observations from the American Society of General Surgeons meeting in New York City, where academic presenters championed controversial minimally invasive approaches — such as laparoscopic closure of diverticular perforation without resection — that struck the author as treatments that would fail an oral board exam.
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Importing Mail Message Attachments Into Aperture
An AppleScript called SaveAttachments2Aperture was created to import email attachments directly into Apple Aperture, filling the gap left by the missing Quick Look shortcut that iPhoto users already enjoyed, with later versions adding file-type filtering and support for common camera raw formats.
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Biden VEEP??
Obama selected six-term Delaware senator Joe Biden as his running mate, prompting skepticism about how a longtime Washington insider squares with a campaign built on the promise of change.
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iCal - Exchange Time Zone Fix - Chapter 2
A substantially rewritten iCal-Invite-Fix AppleScript handles the three main Exchange/Outlook invite types (REQUEST, PUBLISH, and CANCEL) and multiple encoding formats, with detailed setup instructions for configuring script properties and wiring the script to a Mail rule.
