Getting out of the military and being a single parent of two kids presented a challenge along with finding a home, getting the kids enrolled in schools, ect. ect. ect… the hell was real. Once it was all accomplished and things were moving along smoothly it was time to look toward the kids and assess how they were doing with friends and education. Friends were lacking and the public school system was nothing like schools in and around our previous military stations. Something had to be done and greatschools.org did not help one bit in finding good schools either. The site has good intentions, and I can see how it would work, if the districts did not fudge numbers for additional funding. This is something that frustrated me extensively.
Looking toward the kids the question was presented, how can I make this better and be positive? Growing up in the “Jeep / Off-Road” world, initially it was just about having fun and conquering the next hill. It grew into “Leave No Trace” meaning, don’t leave trash behind, pick up trash, stay on the trail and don’t destroy the habitat around the trail, leave it better than you found it. Why does this only have to apply to the trail, why can’t it apply to people on this planet, why can’t we strive to leave the world a better place than we started with, leave a positive mark when our time is up?
During this time I had lots of appointments with the SBA (Small Business Administration) and SCORE. Chuck McGraw was my assigned mentor and a phenomenal person at that. During my mentorship Chuck was building his own airplane and had dreams of flying above the clouds in peace. I’m not sure where Chuck is in the world today but I am sure if he is not with us anymore, he is soaring above the clouds enjoying the beauty of it all in peace. After discussing with Chuck for many weeks about ideas and handing ideas off to others to pursue through Chuck, it was settled to build something in my garage. Do we build PC’s, do I build a website hosting platform, maybe a restaurant where we cook burritos in foil on engine blocks like I do when I’m Off-Roading in my jeep.
If you haven’t done this for a long road trip, you’re missing out. Wrap some burritos in foil, you can even do corn dogs, Hot Pockets, ect. and set them on the exhaust manifold of the engine to cook while you drive. In a few hours stop and pop the hood, grab your sauce, my personal favorite to keep on hand is Tabasco Chipotle sauce, spread it on and take a bite! You’ll thank me later I promise! Leave pictures in the Discord too if you want, I would love to see what you all cook up on your trips! (Maybe I’ll do another post but more extensive on this topic, it is pretty fun!)
Back to my kids, as the question circled around my head as to what could I do to make this better for them, they asked me if they could play Minecraft. My initial reaction was no, but then I thought about some of the things others have talked about in the game relating to STEM and I conceded. Two Minecraft account cards were purchased and the kids were happy. A couple days had passed and the kids asked me if they could play together somehow in the same world. At the time I had no idea if this was even possible, but having played with each other in Command & Conquer – Generals, I figured it had to be possible and my daughter confirmed. It was my daughter that said she could start a world on her PC and my son could join over the network, this was great for about a week and the complaint was the world was only accessible if my daughters PC was on and she was in the world. I was asked if I could make a world that is on all the time and I offered my PC with my account logged into it as a solution. But then I couldn’t do anything else at the time, it was possible but inconvenient for me.
Turning to Google and looking for ways to have a Minecraft world stay online for everyone to log into, returned back, how to setup my own Minecraft Server. 3 months later and I couldn’t tell you how many days I spent with no sleep or 100% frustrated and about to blow up on why this thing wouldn’t work, we had a functional Minecraft Server on the home network. My kids got into the server and started moving around the world, building houses and that is when I bought myself a Minecraft account.
Those 3 months I learned about computers, bottle necking, RAM, CPU, Cores, Motherboard FSB’s, PCI-e, RamDisk, HDD Sata transfer rates, Network speed, NIC, types of network cable, wireless connectivity, port forwarding (OMG This was so frustrating and it was only on the server, I hadn’t gotten to the router yet) and deeper into Windows. The weight of the world had been lifted off my shoulders when the server came online and my kids could connect, I felt free and like I had accomplished something. Celebrations were happening in my head, lots of confetti flying around up there, it was a good time.
All of that came to a sudden halt with in minutes as my kids asked if I could make the Minecraft world so their friends from the military and from school could join the Minecraft Server. Karma made a sudden strike at my happiness, the nightmare continues.
After Googling, “How to make my Minecraft Server accessible from the Internet” the return was more port forwarding, DMZ stuff, and how to port forward in your router or gateway, but none of the models were like mine. Spending days on this project, I learned how it works, what was needed to make this a success and started looking around my equipment for how it could be done. A few days later, we had a Minecraft Server that my kids and their friends could play on together. It was over! YAY…. or was it?
Karma strikes again, the kids looked at me and said they couldn’t talk to their friends while playing in the Minecraft server, they could only type. Teamspeak had a solution and I set it up which turned out to be pretty awesome at the time. By this point though I’d learned my lesson, you can’t celebrate anything or karma shows up, but it didn’t matter, the kids asked for another request, “can we have our friends over so we can all play Minecraft together in the house?”
Karma has no chill.
Going back to SCORE for another meeting, I brought all this up to Chuck and he replied, “Why not just use the garage?” He wasn’t wrong, but it meant so much more work. The Garage LAN began to be built though after that day. Plastic folding banquet tables were bought from Walmart and black metal folding chairs were bought from Target. (this is after using desks and our own furniture to try out the concept first) Extension cords were ran across the house along with bright blue ethernet cables, the LAN was setup and no one had PC’s or didn’t want to bring their parents PC’s to the garage. Now it was back to “Leaving the world a better place than you found it.” and I told my kids, if your friends have PC’s they are willing to learn about computers, they have C’s or above and are not involved in stupid shit like Gangs, Drugs, ect, they can come over, setup their PC’s and we can game. (This is where I added something extra without saying anything)
I told myself if their friends came over they obviously had interest. If I had them open their PC’s and they walked through learning how it all worked, then I would observe them playing, interacting and talking about their interests to get an idea of what kind of PC to build for them. They would owe nothing back, except to have C’s or above, not get involved in any stupid shit and to get a High School Diploma. If they agreed, I presented parts for a new gaming PC they could bring over and play with their friends in a good positive environment.
The first few kids built their PC’s with my help, after I would encourage my kids and their friends to help more than me in each build and if they could power it on, install windows and no problem existed, they got to keep the PC.
This was all out of pocket from me, Razer appeared and offered a discount which turned affiliate later. Fry’s Electronics helped out before going out of business and supplied a 30% discount to the purchase of parts and after a while asked my opinion on what parts they should stock. Many more have come and gone, positive and negative reactions happened between people but all had driven the Garage LAN to become what it became at its end, the most awesome garage in history and it was all because of 2 kids and Minecraft.
I’ve always used Minecraft from that day to learn IT (Information Technology) and will continue as long as Microsoft keeps supporting the game as it is a phenomenal game and tool for STEM in not only providing a way to learn programing and see its results in game but the back end in servers, networking, hosting, security and experiencing what you’ve created.
Karma… contain yourself please, but as long as I am in the tech industry, I will do my best to always have a running Minecraft Server because of the great stories, experiences, and interactions that happened within the Garage LAN.
Definitely one of the best times of my life.
TekRP – Randy