To be blunt, it seems like you're hindering your self. You seem reluctant to take on the "new things", and work with them. Almost as if you are deliberately attempting to rebel.

Why wouldn't you go and work in an Agile environment? It's a lot less stressful I've found. Also, you say that you don't want to have to argue about using one thing over another, but realistically it's not an argument. It's a discussion about using the right tool for the job.

Just because you're a developer, doesn't mean that you can't work towards taking the other jobs - there are a lot of people that take the change - if they're willing to.

In my opinion, you just need to suck it up and be open to learning new things, and new technologies.

Personally, I'd suggest using something like Vagrant instead - more lightweight in my opinion, in terms of being able to instantly destroy & create a new one with 2 commands.

Although, saying this, there's no reason the OP can't just install Linux over (or alongside) OS X.

I'm curious as to what makes Vagrant more light weight as it still needs some type of VM software.

Its more the discipline that Vagrant creates in letting you repeatedly generate the same environment.

I think you're mistaken. Ben wrote one article, Michael wrote the others, except for the CodeIgniter one.

Feel free, email contact [at] codular [dot] com with your ideas. :)

Absolutely not - there's no reason you can't implement black listing or whatever. I can guarantee that there are URL shorteners out there that redirect to porn.