The last two winters, Jen’s parents have let me borrow their “extra” car because Jen was out of town, or I had to park at an airport, or some other reason. While a Porsche Cayman (S trim or otherwise) can drive in most such scenarios, this winter was particularly brutal, with several storms depositing more snow than such a low car could handle. This made me extremely glad I had an alternative.

I finally found a way to get Final Fantasy 14 working again thanks to a GitHub gist. The author essentially replaces the Final Fantasy 14 Protonfixes launcher script with one that installs FFXIVLauncher into the same Wine instance Steam uses to invoke the game itself. It then uses this launcher instead of the broken one Square-Enix demands. Since Steam invokes the script within Proton, the replacement launcher passes the expected steam account ID to Square and everything magically works.

We are living on the brink of the apocalypse, but the world is asleep. – Joel C. Rosenberg I’m one of the most pessimistic people I know. Yet it’s this same unique trait I exploit while designing High Availability architectures. I expect things to fail, and plan for the worst almost constantly. I’ve based my career on it. Granted, worst case scenarios rarely come to pass, but my motto is and always will be to “Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

Final-est Fantasy Last weekend, I went to try and play Final Fantasy 14 like I normally do, and ran into a nasty surprise. I’ve been playing on Linux this entire time after jumping through a few hoops, and while the game works just fine, the launcher is another matter. Apparently some of the workarounds I put in place were to institute the “old” launcher because the new one uses MSHTML of all things.

Getting Testy I had some blood tests done recently to check a few things because hey, I’m in my 40s now, and I really haven’t seen a doctor for a while. For the most part, things were as expected, but a couple results surprised me. Though looking back on it, maybe they shouldn’t have. First surprise was a good one: my testosterone has basically doubled since the last time I had it tested three years ago.