169: A degree in Minecraft Computer Science
I spent much of today working on my Minecraft server, which has been running in the basement of my parents' house for going on like 4 years now, because I felt it deserved some serious upgrades.
To keep it simple, because it took me a solid 6 hours of work to get set up, I now have multiple minecraft servers (3) running on one machine (which isn't a problem processing-power wise), and when someone connects to said machine, it defaults to the "lobby", and then I can have as many servers as I want. It's currently 2, "boats", which is the world that's been hosted there for like a year, and "vanilla+", intended to be a near-vanilla survival world (vanilla is a term used in many gaming circles to mean unmodified; vanilla+ means modified, but with the intent to keep the original feeling and style of the game). I may add a parkour or dropper map in the future, because it would be super easy to do so, and that way I wouldn't have to take down the system for a one-time fun world.
The thing that took a long while wasn't actually the server setup itself, though getting two more running without disrupting the original did take some work, it was getting the mapping software to work. mcmap.lukeoliver.net now has seven maps on it, rather than 3 (that's 3 dimensions of two worlds, as well as the lobby), which I'm pretty proud of. It wasn't that technically difficult, but I did the entire thing via the command line (sometimes 4 or 5 of them at a time) from my laptop, which felt very hacker-ey, and was fun. The new maps aren't very flushed out, for obvious reasons, but I am going to try and get my friends back into Minecraft in the next little while, because winter break is such a good time for such things, so hopefully we'll explore the map together and start building stuff on it.
The only other thing I did today was play more Destiny with Cody and my dad, which was good. We almost got the dungeon in under an hour, and we didn't even wipe, which was great. I didn't get anything incredible, but I moved the quest one step further, and got more versions of some of the weapons that I really like, so I'm not complaining.
It's currently 2:05AM, so I'm going to leave it there, but I'm calling today a success. I didn't expect to get the minecraft server completely back to operational, but I did, so I can hopefully play on it some tomorrow.