Surgical Diversions

After more than five years of self-hosting, the decision was made to move to Dreamhost and let professionals handle server administration, with transferring existing IMAP email being the biggest concern.

A quick tip showing how to delete a remote tag from GitHub with a single terminal command, motivated by not wanting to create version tags for minor CSS tweaks to personal child themes.

A photo post featuring a nighttime shot of Marilyn.

A photo post featuring a sunrise over the desert landscape.

A brief photo post celebrating becoming a teenager and the excitement of receiving an iPhone 5C as a birthday gift.

A quick photo from a visit to the Apple Store to pass the time.

A sibling makes a data-driven argument that federal spending well above its historical 20% of GDP average has put the country on an unsustainable debt path, warning that rising interest rates could eventually crowd out all other government priorities.

A sibling breaks down the three major TARP programs on their fourth anniversary, showing that while bank and AIG investments returned a profit to taxpayers, the GM bailout remained billions underwater due to bankruptcy proceedings that controversially pri…

A brief birthday wish for Sophie, who is nearly a teenager.

Introduction of a WordPress plugin that adds background color support to event categories in the month view of The Events Calendar, integrating with its settings page via the Tribe Settings API and available in the WordPress plugin repository.

Announcement of a WordPress plugin that adds alarm and reminder support to calendar events created with Events Calendar PRO, requiring an Additional Field to be created in The Events Calendar settings before installation.

A short birthday message of love for Sophie.

A detailed walkthrough for setting up a chroot jail for SFTP on Mac OS X Server, covering sshd_config changes, directory ownership rules, using bindfs via Homebrew to mount folders into the jail, and an extra step required after upgrading to Mountain Lion…

A brief personal tribute to Steve Jobs following his death, expressing sadness at losing someone whose creativity and genius enriched so many lives.

A birthday note for Jonathan on his sixteenth birthday, revealing that his gifts include an iPhone 3GS from his parents and an iPad 2 from his grandparents.

How to set up a personal WebDAV share on Mac OS X Server as self-controlled online storage, covering creation of a Web Realm in Server Admin, setting folder permissions, and creating a symlink so the share can be mounted via Connect to Server from macOS or

A fix for a Fail2ban issue on OS X where multiple bans sharing the same ipfw rule number get cleared prematurely, solved by generating a random rule number via a shell variable, with custom jails and filters available as a downloadable bundle.

An overview of custom Fail2ban modifications for Snow Leopard Server adding jails for SMTP, POP, IMAP, VNC, and invalid web requests, distributed as a downloadable tarball with an installation script and LaunchDaemon plists to keep Fail2ban running reliab…

Quick notes on configuring Snow Leopard iCal Server with the correct Wiki Server settings to get group calendars working, including the exact CalDAV URL formats for both macOS iCal and iOS clients.

A guide to manually editing Sieve email filter rules on Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server using terminal commands to locate and modify user-specific sieve script files, including a workaround requiring HTTPS for wiki settings changes to take effect.

After migrating to OS X Snow Leopard Server, Dovecot mail folder permission errors caused webmail failures, and terminal scripts using chown are provided to bulk-fix ownership across all mail user directories or reset permissions for a single account by G…

How to get WordPress automatic plugin and theme updates working on OS X Server by fixing Apache file ownership with chown and adding a direct filesystem method constant to wp-config.php, with a note that the fix works for plugins and themes but not core W…

A step-by-step guide to enabling server-side email filtering with Sieve on Mac OS X Server, covering the Sieve service setup, installation of the avelsieve SquirrelMail plugin, and a fix for an authentication bug in its PHP library.

A command-line workflow for reviewing and releasing SpamAssassin-quarantined email on OS X Server using TextExpander snippets to automate copying, unzipping, previewing, and releasing messages, making the entire process manageable from an iPhone or iPad.

A tip for suppressing automatic email replies when accepting or declining iCal invites on Mac OS X, with a downloadable script bundle containing install and uninstall shell scripts and a pointer to the iCal Reply Checker app for those who prefer a GUI.

First impressions of the original iPad after handling one at the hospital, noting its light weight, bright display, and usable keyboard, while looking forward to the upcoming iPhone 4.0 announcement.

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.

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…

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 a…

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…

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.

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…

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 relati…

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.

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

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…

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.

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 scri…

An interim update to the MailExchange2iCal-TZ-fix script fixes a parsing failure for .ics invites delivered only as attachments or in base64 encoding, and corrects the script so it runs reliably from a Mail rule.

A satirical list of eleven things Americans do not have an inherent right to — written by Lewis Napper — is shared as a counterpoint to entitlement culture, emphasizing personal responsibility over government guarantees.

The post argues that physicians brought the Medicare reimbursement crisis on themselves by accepting low contracted rates, and endorses letting the 10.6% cuts stand in hopes the financial pain will finally compel doctors and hospitals to cancel their Medi…

A personal reflection on how meanness is always a choice and the hurt it causes can outlast any apology, with a hope that a young son learns early to let slights go and give people second chances.

A brief firsthand account of an emergency department thoracotomy on a pulseless penetrating chest trauma patient, revealing a large atrial wound that let air flood the chest with every breath — a stark reminder of why ED thoracotomies carry such high mort…

A lawyer showed up uninvited outside the ICU to solicit a trauma family, claiming a vehicle defect — even though the driver was intoxicated and traveling over 100 mph — confirming that ambulance chasing is very much real.

CMS expanded its list of so-called never events — hospital-acquired conditions it will no longer reimburse — and a surgeon argues the policy is a cost-cutting measure disguised as patient safety, since many of these conditions cannot be prevented 100% of…

A single AppleScript solution is presented to fix the broken time zone information that Microsoft Exchange injects into iCal meeting invites, preventing Mac users from missing meetings by correcting the TZID before the event is imported.

A frustrating CMS billing dispute is recounted after performing immediate breast reconstruction following another surgeon's mastectomies, with Medicare refusing payment because the add-on code requires both procedures to be done by the same physician.

A regional Level 1 trauma center refused a difficult transfer for specialized endovascular care, sparking reflection on how academic medical centers have drifted from their traditional mission of supporting community surgeons without question.

The new year brought grief when a dear friend lost his mother in the emergency department, a loss made more painful coming just over seven years after the death of her son Henry, who was also a close friend.

An announcement that the author is closing his elective surgical practice to join a local trauma group, a move driven by the rising costs of running a private office.