I'll leave the others to answer the other questions, but

> I guess I should ask the group: are beginners of my sort welcome here?

Absolutely. It's appreciated if people do their homework first, as much as
they are able to (Google, PICLIST FAQ etc), but beginners are always welcome
(and also usually welcomed :-) ).

Re ASCII art
It helps if you

- use hard spaces and not tab stops
- use a fixed width (non proportional) font

Often you can redeem a scrambled picture by pasting it into another
application that treats it as it was originally treated and not as outlook /
Outlook-Express interprets it. I find that pasting ASCII art into notepad
often (but not always) makes it understandable. Not using tabs helps.



        Russell McMahon

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