Frank Hagan

You should be able to upload it to her webspace, and then just provide a link to it here: http://www.yourdomain.tld/video.mpg When people click on it, they'll be able to play it in a new window (depending on how their browser is set up). How big is the video? I can enable uploading here if people are interested in doing that.

I like that. I had a friend send me something similar once, and I laughed so hard it hurt. I sent him back a picture of me in his dream car ... a British racing green Miata that he wanted so bad he could taste it. I took a picture my wife took of me stooping to pick up dog sh ... well, droppings ... in the back yard, cropped it and dropped it into the Miata picture. I was hysterical by the time I hit "send," so my wife naturally came and asked what was up. Somehow it lost something in the translation, because it wasn't nearly as funny to her as it was to me.

I always thought it would be interesting to see people express themselves with avatars, but you have brought it to a new level!

I had never sailed ... even as crew ... before launching my boat. I had several people along who were experienced, and they helped me learn. It was an awesome experience, learning to sail in a boat I built myself. So I highly recommend it.

No matter what happens in this series, Buck, you guys have proved yourselves to be real men of the sea. Heck, other countries have to borrow your guys to win the thing!

To put a link to a forum topic in a Gallery picture comment field, copy the forum topic URL and then insert it in the Gallery comment field, along with your other comments. Clicking on it will open the forum topic in a new window. You can go the other way, providing a link to a particular picture and its comments in the Gallery by copying the URL and pasting it in the message ... and then highlighting it and clicking the "URL" button to make it into an active link: http://www.messing-about.com/photopost/showphoto.php?photo=42 The URL is found in your browser's address bar when you are viewing the Gallery page or forum topic.

And the other way is to upload the photo to our server. But that's where you do run into file size limitations. If its over a certain dimension, it will appear as a link instead of a picture (so it doesn't slow down forum loading for everyone else), and if its over a certain size it isn't allowed to save disk space. I'll see if there's an "auto-resizer" I can install to automatically make the picture an allowable size and store it on the server.

I'm actually looking for a better way to do this, but here goes: Click on the picture to maximize it in the Gallery, and then right click and select "Properties". Highlight the "Address/URL" by clicking and dragging on it starting at the "http://" ... it will scroll down so you get the entire URL highlighted, including the ".jpg" file extension at the end. Press CTRL-INSERT or Edit*Copy from the menu, and click CANCEL. The URLs are still pretty long, and look something like this: http://www.messing-about.com/~fshagan/photopost/data/500/75P2170045-med.jpg To insert it into a forum message, start entering the message and click the "Img" button on top of the "Post a Reply" form, press SHIFT-INSERT or Edit*Paste to copy the URL in the message, and then click the "Img*" button again to close the tag. It works like this: I'd love to get a way for users to select a pic to install from within the message post, but so far haven't found it. So for now, we have this awkward, round-about way of doing it.

I love the sketches in the Sailor's Sketchbook from Bruce Bingham. I included one of his sketches in our article on scarfing rubrails at http://www.messing-about.com/weekender/scarf.htm. And I noticed its on sale right now from Amazon.com for anyone who's interested (you can buy through our link, which helps support the site, or you can take the ISBN number which is found in the URL when you go to our "review page" for it and order it from your local bookseller). Here's the link to our "review page" on it: Sailor's Sketchbook

Let's put together a list, so we can stick it on a poster and just point to it when someone says "Why on earth are you building a boat?" I don't think it really deserves a deep, philosophical answer, but one more in keeping with Dave's "Top Ten" list. But you can suggest whatever you'd like, as long as its brief enough to be put on a list. Here's mine: Mermaids!

Oops. Just found a table for 2002 ... the above figures are from 2000. So Paul, what is happening in Washington? The figures from 2002 show your state ranked 20th in state and local tax as a percentage of income, but SECOND in total tax (including Federal income tax). Time to move, or throw a modern day little tea party next time an election comes up. Whoever's in, throw 'em out! Table is at http://www.taxfoundation.org/statelocal02.html

What's that old thing about statistics? You can say anything you want with them. I guess beer drinkers definately have it worse in Washington than California. And drivers definately have it worst here' date=' an oil producing state with refineries up the gazoo, and some of the highest gas prices (I just paid $1.8999 on the way home from work tonight). But to compare rates, you have to compare the total tax bite the state has. I've seen state taxes expressed several different ways ... comparing rate vs. rate, totaling all the rates and averaging them, etc. But the most fair comparison in my opinion is when you compare the total tax collected by the state per capita. Then I found a handy little chart that showed not only the amount collected per capita, but also per $1000 of income. [url']http://www.taxfoundation.org/staterankings.html[/url] California comes in 6th in $ collected per capita, and 12th in $ collected per $1000 of income. Washington is 13th per capita and 24th per $1000 of income. Oregon is 34th and 32nd. The highest? Connecticut in $ collected per capita, and Hawai'i in $ collected per $1000 in income. I understand paying more to live in California or Hawai'i ... but Connecticut? Sheesh!

Tim, we pay a "personal property tax" that is assessed each year. In California, the county assesses it, but it is different state by state. The state just makes sure you paid sales taxes on the materials, or "use tax" on materials bought out of state, and has a small licensing fee ($12 or something like that). But then the county tax assessor sends you a letter, and you have to provide a picture of the boat and he makes a determination as to how much tax you should pay. I have yet to get a personal property tax bill for my Weekender. They have sent me two letters, requesting the picture. So with the second one, I called them to make sure it wasn't lost in the mail. The gal looked up my file, and started giggling, and then said "Oh yes, Mr. Hagan, we got the picture of your boat. If the assessor feels you owe any tax (he he), he'll send you a bill." First time NOT paying a tax made me mad!

Its ranging from 1.79 to 1.98 per gallon here for Unleaded. In California, you have to remember that about .18 are state taxes, so we are often higher than other states. All of the gas we buy has about .18 federal tax tapped on to it. We took my wife's Sienna Van to the boat show yesterday, instead of my truck (which gets 17gpm). When it gets too expensive, even I will drive a mini-van! :roll:

The little folder icons get really excited when there's a lot of activity on a post, and they start wiggling like that. So its an indication there's a lot of activity in that post. I'd like it better if it told you how many unread messages in that thread, but hey, I'll take a wiggle if that's all I get! :wink:

A lot of the boat maintenance articles here in the states now recommend exterior latex (water based) paint for the inside of boats. They still recommend marine paints for the topside, but where the paint is protected from the elements, the cheaper exterior latex works fine.

My sister and her friend were out bodysurfing, and one "crashed" into the water between them ... and they were only about 4' apart! Scared the daylights out of them. One of the most beautiful things I've ever seen was one morning, bobbing in the fog on my boogie board and not able to see the shore, and hearing a sound, looking up and out of the mist a line of 6 or 7 pelicans flying so low toward me that they rose up a bit while they made their in-line avoidance move. Wow!

I'm playing with the script to display a selection of boat building books on our Bookstore Page. Its not pretty yet, and certainly not finished, but when I entered a search for the long-out-of-print Amphora by Peter Stevenson, I got a page of 6 dealers selling the book, from $3.00 to $150.00. $150 :!: Now, its a fun book, and it does have a very young Mike Stevenson pictured in it, but $150! I also searched for "Sailboats You Can Build," Peter's book that includes the first Skipjack, and its available used from $8.95 to $23.53. So its worth checking the "used" links when you're looking for books.

My Gallery now shows up on Netscape 4.x ... I had to change the style of the page, so its ugly, but it shows up. It will take a little while to load with a dial up connection, so be patient ... Netscape doesn't handle tables very well, and all the formatting within picture albums are in tables. On my system, it takes a full 4 seconds to load just the index page (about twice as long as with more modern browsers). Netscape still errors out on Mark Hughes' photos for some reason. Mozilla and IE process the pages fine, but Netscape 4.x gives a "Bad Request" error. Still haven't figured that one out. If anyone has Netscape 6 or 7, please let me know if it works with those browsers. Click this link: My Gallery to open the My Gallery pages in a separate window.

I'll have to continue working with it from home, where I have Netscape 4.7.

I uploaded 105 new Avatars for your posting pleasure. An Avatar is an image that appears under your name. They are in the categories and also listed separately in the "New021303" folder. I also increased the maximum size to 120 x 120 pixels and 8192 bytes. You can choose an Avatar from our selection by using the Profile menu, or upload your own image not greater than 120 x 120 and 8192 bytes. [attachment over 4 years old deleted by admin]

Welcome back Joe! :thumbsup: