Check out some of the other blogs and sites that we really like:

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• SubmarineBoat
• We Live On A Boat
• Life Aboard Mazurka
• John's Sailing Web
• Boat Bits
• Navagear.com
• Eli Boat

Classic Yacht Magazine has their new third issue out. Of particular note to me is an article on electric boats.

Their photography is quite nice, page layout is good. I was very unsure of one of these "turn the page" format online magazines instead of just an HTML page, but it really seems well done and works well, even on a Linux box. read more »

It seems that since the Internet has become "popular," especially outside of the United States, whatever I'm interested in has a huge German following. The search engines will find many references to German pages or forum postings that look like they might solve my problem or answer my question, if only I could read them.

The best solution I had was a native German who sat next to me at work for some time... if I ran across something, he could just read it to me. Since that situation has changed, now I'm on my own (well, guess I could email them to him, but turnaround time might be a bit much :-).

Since the boating world has continued this trend toward several German/Dutch sites that seem interesting, I've been exercising the online translators more... Babelfish was the old favorite, and now I find that Google can do the same... You can feed them words or point them to an entire web page. Google, at least, has a set of buttons which you can add to your favorites that let you send the current page to the translator.

• http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr
• http://translate.google.com/translate_t
  

• http://www.aluriverboat.de/main_entry.htm - A neat home designed and constructed aluminum river craft
• http://www.boote-forum.de/ - An extensive boating forum
  

Today Google made available a new feature in their collection of search tools. It allows you to define what they call a "Custom Search Engine" that lets you provide a list of links which they either search exclusively, or give preference to. The idea is that you can search for things about your area of interest and get much more targeted results since somebody has already "vetted" the links that will be pulled from, and hopefully eliminated a lot of the "extras" we always find. read more »

If you aren't familiar with the old world of Usenet News (back mostly in the days of the text based internet before web browsers brought us graphics and pictures), then you may not realize that mailing lists are an outgrowth of that communication form. Newsgroups as they were known as, were publically accessible discussion groups. Anybody could read. Anybody could post. After a while, this free-for-all grouping began to be overrun by the spammers and people who could stay reasonably on-topic. There is still a huge world of Usenet, but its not something that I follow any longer. read more »