Would you rather? 

1:  Work a high paying job with sufficiently high stress for 15 years. Put off having a family, put your entire life on hold, but enjoy making a few houndred thousand dollars a year for the rest of your life. 

2: Work an hourly job making about 30K/year for the rest of your life, but live life to the full within your means, have a family, start your life, and get a head start with where you're at now in terms of your social life, family, and so forth. 

Many people ask this question of themselves. Curious what your answers will be!

Hello all, 

I threw this one together real quick tonight. It calculates the average rating of a user's threads on the forum, and displays this rating on the profile. We're using it here, and it offers a simple quality measurement of the threads posted on the forum. Hopefully this makes thread ratings a little more useful.

Disclaimer: Not responsible for any forum drama.

Features include: 

• Calculates average thread ratings on user profiles.
  
• Usergroup settings for which profiles are enabled. (For example, you could disable this for banned users or new members. These members would not have their averages displayed on their profile. )
  
• Separate usergroup setting to control master visibility. (For example, you could prevent guests or other usergroups from viewing ratings entirely). 
  
• Minimum threshold setting. This allows administrators to set a minimum number of ratings to calculate before averages are shown on profiles. This helps to prevent abuse if only a few ratings are available. 
  

Smileys on klick shoutbox ....I found something on the net and adapted something

Hello all, 

I've been a loyal MyBB user for many years, but phpBB seems to have come a long way in recent years. I'm not very familiar with it to be honest. It's more popular and more widespread than MyBB (and SMF as well), and the extensions and themes seem to be very good. It also has alerts and responsiveness out the box. 

I'm curious to see what administrators who use it think of the software. What made you choose phpBB as your software of choice, and what do you like most about it?

Debian vs. Ubuntu. This seems like this question should be absolutely obvious. Ubuntu is based on Debian, and is generally the more popular of the two. Most people would choose Ubuntu in a heartbeat.

So the question is why. And the answer is that, generally speaking, Ubuntu is so much easier to use. It has PPAs which make third party software much easier to install, and it includes a lot of non-free components that are at least available. Doesn't mean they are necessarily well... out of the box, but being available is a great thing. Because sometimes you want to be able to play an MP3. 

Debian sure does have its advantages though. I literally use it as my daily driver on my development virtual machine (and I do all C development, most of my HDL development, and a number of other things solely from the development box currently. I use it very frequently). 

Debian, in my experience, is much more stable. And it actually has more packages than Ubuntu, by a long shot (Ubuntu removes a lot and makes you use Snaps or PPAs for some of the more obscure ones). It is a much cleaner experience and it very rarely ever crashes or has any issue whatsoever. So personally, even though I prefer Ubuntu on a server (newer software), I prefer Debian on the desktop.

The only downside to Debian is that a lot of Ubuntu's desktop Gnome improvements aren't really available on Debian, and stock Gnome have never been my cup of tea. I installed a lot of extensions and a highly customized theme to get around this issue, but it's definitely a challenge at first if you aren't used to using Gnome. Dash to Panel is a lifesaver.

What are your preferences?

I can't even unsee this. This was at the end of Trump's speech. Not even entirely sure what the motive of this was, he had already completed it... 

Some things just are... Uneasy.

I've never really been a fan of the new Xenforo. Honestly, the old one was better. It was almost perfect, albeit missing a few things... but it was something new and unique, had just enough ajax to be worthwhile, and was clean and had some really unique and interesting features. 

Now, the new one looks like this: https://xenforo.com/community/

I'm like... uh. That's not what it was supposed to be. Granted, nobody really ever uses the default theme, but unlike MyBB, Xenforo forums pretty much always look like Xenforo. MyBB forums tend to be made to look like whatever people want them to look like. But with Xenforo, you can just... tell. It's Xenforo every time. 

I mean, it honestly seems like good software, but all of the animations and extra visual effects and clutter in the design is just a bit much for me. I think they really tried to simplify it with Xenforo 2, but they made it look a little worse in my opinion. 

What are your thoughts? Have any of you guys ever used Xenforo to have more experience on this one?

We all have hobbies that came from deep within our childhoods. 

Personally, playing guitar and programming random things (and some electronics) were mine. I still do pretty much all of it, even to this day. Gosh, I was what, in 6th grade when I picked a lot of it up. I didn't have much of a normal childhood because we were moving so much, over and over and over again. So that was my escape from the world. 

What are your early hobbies that you carried with you to this day?

We've been working hard on the forum over this past week. A few quick updates that I wanted to share! 

• Users can now log in with Google, for the very first time. Still working out the details of this, but it's much easier than the standard form of registration and authentication. No existing users will be affected, and the standard form of registration will still work as always! More social networks to come in the future. (If you're a member already, you may optionally link your account in the user CP if you wish!)
  
  
• We have a brand new PM conversation system that uses text-message style PMs. Check out any existing PMs to see the new system. It groups all PMs with any given user into a single thread and shows you the full history. 
  
  
• You can now put a youtube link to your favorite song into your profile (Go to user CP -> Edit Profile). Special profile photos are also now added and available as well.
  
  
• You can now drag/drop attachments and images directly into posts. You can even drag/drop images directly inline to your post imgur-style. Give it a try next time you need to post an image with your post!
  • We still recommend using our image host if you have large image files or a large number of them. Attachment limits are capped at this time, whereas our image host has no limits.  

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/02/world...dates.html

People at work have already started doing this. We are always getting in and out of people's vehicles, delivering vehicles to sick people's homes, and so forth. We sanitize cars thoroughly with hospital-grade solution every time we get in and out, but there's only so much we can do. People have started making their own face masks because, of course, they are in very short supply. A number of mechanics had a supply of gloves and masks for automotive work from home, and have since donated them to hospitals (very kind of them). 

Would you consider wearing one of these if it were recommended in your area? I'm starting to consider it myself.