For your pic... under your name
click My Home ... click on Edit "Personal information, email, password, etc"
under "Your Picture (Entire URL - Picture size is 65x75 pixels)" enter a website where you have a GIF file. Remeber the size constraint.
So anyone that has web server with pictures on it one can reference that location...for instance mine is "http://www.spacelofts.com/badcrash.gif"

Try this one and put it in your settings:
http://www.spacelofts.com/scbbb.gif

For inserting image in this forum just place the <.image>http://www.spacelofts.com/scbbb.gif<./image> tag

Take the dots out between the brackets where you see image and /image. That is for illustration only.