We live about 25 miles SW of Portland, Oregon. Last week we had high winds and watched the the smoke rolling over Chehalem Mountain and a constant stream of horse and stock trailers taking animals off of the mountain. Then about 11:30 that night we watched the flames roll over the top. Deep ravines and few roads made it tough on the firefighters. The wind died down some and luckily only barns were lost and the fire and after making the crest the fire didn't continue down the south side. We were about five miles away.
The winds also fanned a wildfire about 25 miles east and another 35 miles SE burning thousands of acres and hundreds, maybe thousands, of homes. The eventually became one fire. Much of it is still uncontrolled and a huge area is still evacuated. Whole towns have been leveled. A cousin lost their home and their cabin on the Santiam River and were with in-laws and evacuated again -- we haven't heard more since.
Have only seen the sun once today and that was about 10:00 this morning when there was an hazy orange orb in the sky for a little while. There is a slight breeze and visibility varies from a few blocks to maybe a quarter mile at "good" times. We had high humidity yesterday and were hoping for a bit of rain and a few sprinkles were reported but I never did see any. It's been reported that we have had the worst air pollution levels because of the smoke of any major city in the world. A couple of times I checked the index was above 500 and this mooring it was "only" 478.
We're just thankful that where we live is relatively safe from fire and that others we know my be displaced but are safe.

Not much different than eBay now including the shipping cost when calculating the their percentage of the "sale."

About a year ago we decided to try processing about 10 rolls that had been lurking in the back of a drawer for years. Some Ektacolor, some Ektachrome, and a couple or rolls of a color reversal film from Seattle Filmworks. The had a system of using a movie film and stand developing included negative, slides and new film in the reused canister. Prints were also available.

We took them to Blue Moon Camera in Portland, Oregon. They agreed to develop all of them with some adjustment in development because of age -- but no guarantees! The Seattle Filmworks would be developed as monochrome because the exact process for the film was no longer available. About a third were low contrast and low saturation, about a third looked like they were taken with candlelight, and the last third just had a few visible spots of reflections but one frame showed the iron frame of a window at my wife's parents' home on the Navaho Reservation in Arizona and would have been taken no later than the mid-80s. One of the rolls was nearly totally washed out but obviously taken at Canyon de Chelly at Chinle, Arizona -- one of my favorite places to be with camera in hand -- and last visited last fall.

One roll had a pictures of our son's birthday party in the late 70s. By playing around converting various colors to b/w I did produce some prints but they are grainy, appear out of focus, and somewhat ghostly.

All in all it was expensive but worth it.

I fully retired about a year ago after 60+ years in the printing industry, most of it in prepress where dealing with photographs was a daily occurrence.

First let's deal with a couple of statements -- "enlarge the 8 by 10" OR "reduce the 8 by 12". Unless the rules of math and ratios are suspended, not allowing for bleeds, the 8" dimension of BOTH will require an enlargement of 106.25% with the 8x10 needing 110% to achieve the 11" finished size.

As to "why," my best guess is that 8x10 is more closely proportional to an 8½x11 than the 8x12 allowing the photographer to easily visualize the finished cropping. Not considering the bleed trim requirements, after enlargement the 8x10 would only require .3" of vertical cropping compared to the 8x12 requiring 1.75" horizontal cropping after enlargement to achieve the 8½x11 finished size.

Things have changed greatly over the years with digital providing its own set of communication challenges. Earlier for high quality publications we required b/w prints to be within 75% of final reproduction size or larger and transparencies for color work to be accompanied by a print of approximately final print size. Today the requirement is usually stated in minimum pixels (usually 300) per lineal inch of final reproduction size. e.g. 2400x3000 minimum pixels for a 8x10 image.

One of the challenges is that our label products usually need the customer's company logo. Often the logo arrives as a photocopy or screen print or a low resolution JPG screenshot. That results in our request for original art, digital vector art, or if appropriate, a high resolution TIFF file with a 300 dpi or greater resolution. More than once what came back was the JPG screenshot converted to TIFF and the dpi upped to 300 dpi in some photo editing program with the customer not having a clue why the new file was no better than the first one!

I clicked on the link to see what was recommended.
Then . . . when I clicked on the next post, up popped a B&H ad for about a dozen different players!
Just remember, there is nobody out there spying on you!

I did note that the original post asked about a DVD player that could be used both on a computer AND a TV,
I'm not sure that I've seen such a thing.

I can read and comprehend it easily. But after 50+ years in printing with a good share of that time in typesetting, editing, and proofreading, it did make my brain hurt a bit as I struggled to resist grabbing my red pen and making corrections!

After reading the comment about the motorcycle driving test, I realized it was 50 years ago this month that I took my last driving tests after moving from a small town in Kansas to Oregon. My wife was petrified about taking the test and wanted me to "go first" so I could tell her what the test was like. So I went down took the written test then drove about two blocks over to where the officer was giving the driving tests. I passed it with no problem. I went home and took my wife later in the morning -- she had no problem.

In the afternoon I went back to take the motorcycle test. In Kansas at the time, the motorcycle endorsement only required a written test and I'd heard that there was a driving test in Oregon and was puzzled but learned that it just required being able to navigate around cones in a parking lot within sight of the officer. So I took the written test and again headed to where the driving tests were being given.
When I arrived, the officer said, "Welcome back, can I have your paperwork?" I handed him the papers and he just checked a couple of boxes, signed them and gave me a copy. I must have looked puzzled because he explained -- "I was watching when you left the station. You pulled into traffic correctly, and signaled the left turn correctly even when you didn't know I was watching."

I've always wondered how many flunked the test before they even knew it was started!

Reminded me of the question . . .

What can a pigeon do that an out of work stock broker can't?


Make a deposit on a new Mercedes.

During prohibition, my great great uncle and his sons made shine to "keep the taxes paid." The sons had been caught transporting and had received fines and short jail sentences but the law couldn't find the actual still. It was considered to be somewhere "in the sandhills" but was never found. Then one winter day with some snow on the ground, the revenuers came to search the farm but found nothing. Then, as the officers were preparing to leave and had gathered in the barnyard to discuss their next move, one of the officers put his hand on one of the supporting pipes to the large hog shelter -- it was warm!

A further search revealed that the concrete floor of the hog shelter was actually the roof to an underground room containing the mash barrels, the still, and some shine - the pipes that supported the roof were the chimneys and vents for the still. The feed bins and feed troughs concealed the entrance to the underground room. The spent mash was fed to the hogs and a nearby windmill and storage tank provided the necessary cooling water with the pigs enjoying the puddles created by the water from the condenser.

This time the dad and two of the boys got an all expense paid "vacation" at Leavenworth. The upside was that they didn't loose the farm for taxes as many others in the area did.

I and a lot of people in Oregon have that opinion of her, BUT . . .
after thousands descended this weekend on the beaches for "spring break," I have to agree that there are more stupid people in Oregon than I thought. You just can't fix Stupid.

When my grandson and his fiancée are both math majors. He is now teaching advanced college level calculus to middle school and high school students at a charter school and she is pursuing a doctorate in math research -- whatever that is! When they got married last summer, the wedding cake was math themed and one the cakes, a 10" one, had pi to just over 900 decimal places beginning at the top center and continuing in a spiral over the top and down the sides. From a distance it just looked like a white cake covered with blue squiggles but up close you could see that the squiggles were actually numbers about 3/8" high. My son and I have been making wedding and special event cakes for quite a few years. We traded off working on it over a six-hour period and in the end questioned our sanity a bit, but it did garner quite a few comments at the reception.

Thanks! No problem. Yes, the draft horses hold a lot of great memories for me. The largest number I remember having was eight although the main horse barn had stalls for 24. My great-grandfather had the contract for grading the roads in the township and we have a photo of a hitch of 20 horses and mules hooked up to the grader. They would lease horses from the neighbors so that they could use one hitch of 20 in the morning and another hitch of 20 in the afternoon. One person would ride the grader and move the blade up and down as needed and another would either ride one of the front horses or walk beside the front row to guide them. At sharp corners, they would stop and then the horses would step sideways until they were facing the new direction. It can be a tricky maneuver even with a hitch of six to keep a horse from stepping over the traces, but with a hitch of 20 trying to keep all of the traces taut to avoid a step-over would be a real challenge and a test of training. I can remember horses being carefully placed within the hitch -- some just didn't deal well with being in the middle of a three- or four-abreast hitch.

I get my draft horse "fix" every summer at the Oregon State Fair. We try to attend some of the harness competitions -- two-, four-, and six-horse-hitch driving and my favorite the pulling contests.

I grew up on a dairy/grain farm in Kansas. My grandfather loved his horses and trained them for driving competition and pulling. In the later years, he enjoyed nothing more than taking a team and "going to visit the neighbors," which usually meant a four-mile trip around the section where we lived and the neighbors that lived on the three sides around us. In the last few years when he was over eighty, "I'm going to hitch up a team" really meant "Please come hitch a team for me," because he could no longer handle the harness by himself. But, once on the seat and the reins in his hands, he and the team were "one," and with just a few spoken commands and a light touch on the reins, he was on his way. He also enjoyed taking the big hay wagon to Halloween and other church parties and the big skid sled when we had snow -- if kids were involved, he was there.

I wasn't much into photography yet, but I've always wished I had a photo of him on his evening rounds of closing up the chicken houses and barns and stopping at the corral gate with the setting sun in the background. The horses would usually be waiting there because they knew he often had some treat for them, an apple, a carrot, a bit of alfalfa or just a friendly pat on the nose.

As I remember it, the only time the fly nets were used was when the horses were in harness. The style grandpa used were made from cords maybe one-half to three-quarters of an inch apart attached to a band that went down the horses back. The cords draped over the sides of the horse and each ended in a knot that created a "fringe" around the bottom that swayed as the horse moved. There were a couple of horizontal cords on each side that kept the vertical cords evenly spaced. The horses were generally moving so the nets moved around a bit and the flies wouldn't usually go in-between the cords.

Just had a flashback of how heavy and odoriferous the nets were when they were soaked with horse sweat! It's amazing how well I can remember that smell even though its been 60+ years. And there isn't any easy way of getting the net off a Belgian whose back is higher than your head, so you weren't just smelling it -- you are wearing it!

Yes, they were used to keep insects off the draft horses when in harness and their tails were hampered from swinging and they couldn't swing their head to dislodge a particularly pesky horsefly. When the last of the horses and harness were sold in the early 60s, they didn't take the horse fly nets. Last I knew there were still enough for about eight teams hanging on the harness racks in the horse barn at my grandfather's place. They are big enough to cover the whole body of the Belgians over the harness. The sides hung down like fringe that swung as the horses walked. I don't remember them ever being soaked in anything to repel the insects. Thanks for jogging my memories of the "gentle giants" that were such a part of my childhood times at my grandparents farm.

As a printer I've always had access to various binding options with coil binding my favorite for manuals. Comb binding tends to get crushed and won't fully "flip backwards" when opened.

Sometimes the manuals are smaller than 8½x11 and the service can trim them down for you.

If you print just what you need at home, then you can take it to one of the copy centers to have it bound -- usually less then $5.00 but you can check around. We charged $5.00 for the first copy and $3.00 for additional of same size unless the manuals were really thick.

Most services will also have clear plastic covers for a small additional charge -- they are well worth it.