Finding Romania
Romania is a filthy, foul-smelling, burnt-out pit, with beggars and thieves lurking in its every piss-soaked alley and behind its every news camera, state bureau and cash register. Anyone who would even think of visiting, much less living there, belongs in the country's communist-era mental hospitals. There! Are you happy now, you crazy Romanians?

I am still recovering from the jet lag of my month-long visit to my boyfriend's homeland for the winter holidays. We ate a lot and drank a lot ("mancam!" and "bem!" were some of my very first Romanian words) and of course, met a lot of people. By "a lot" I mean family reunion meets college reunion meets job search networking.

My dear friends, many of you seem to think you're unique. You're not. Nearly every person I met, whether we were in a bar or at a dinner table, and whether in English or my boyfriend's translations, immediately said, "So, how do you like Romania?"

At first I answered this question freely, offering my big first impressions and little observations of cultural differences, but I learned quickly to be more careful with my words. No Romanian wants to hear how beautiful his country is.

"But aren't you shocked by the terrible poverty?" erupted from the lips of a guy who had been speaking through my boyfriend for the past hour and a half. (At that moment I was more shocked that you put corn on pizza, but that's another story.) Hmmm, I thought. How to answer this one in an easily translatable sound bite?

"Not really," I said. "There's poverty in America, too, you know." This was met with a smirk I have come to know well, distinctly Eastern European look of disdain, and from what I could make out the conversation then moved on to cell phones. Or cars. Or something.

Sitting there in my uni-linqual prison, I decided to change all future responses to "The Question" to something vaguer, mellower, shorter. "I like it" seemed like it might pass, allow me to weasel out of blame for exploitative Westerners or post-communism malaise. I tried it out.

"How could you possibly like it here?!?!" At first this recurring exchange was interesting; the many possible cultural implications gave me something to think about as the conversation inevitably drifted into rapid Romanian from which I could only pick out the occasional curse word. But eventually it became annoying, really annoying, and I joked that I should have worn a fat suit and carried a wad of $100 bills in my front pocket to blow my nose with. Sigh, maybe next time.

"You just haven't seen the really poor people yet." Well, I did see a guy walking down the street on stumps where his knees should have been. But that was on my way past Escada, Lacoste, Sephora, Adidas and a few crowded jewelry stores advertising Gucci and friends. I guess the thousands of people rushing past him didn't really see the poor people either.

Aahhh, the lubricating effects of capitalism. It makes it so much easier to walk past the guy with the stumps.

So here is that crushing indictment of Romania you've all been waiting for: the most disappointing thing about your country is that it's so much like America. (There, I said it! Ha!) It's pretty easy to walk past the guys with stumps in my hometown, too.

What's that? You didn't see One-Armed Steve on MTV? Well, he was quite popular in the freshman dorms of my university in Atlanta. Steve made his cash after dark buying under-aged students beer at the gas station, as long as they tipped him enough to buy a couple packs of cigarettes. His day job involved standing between the traffic lanes at a busy stop light carrying a "VIETNAM VETERAN" sign and pointing to a cup with the nub that was once his right arm. Sound familiar?

To hear Romanians talk, you'd think they invented the art of amputee begging. That and a thousand other annoyances associated with life among modern humans: crowded buses, rude sales people, smelly garbage, silicon-enhanced news, stupid cops, corruption, public urination.

Allow me to set the record straight -- assholes are everywhere! Your only real choice in the matter is what language you prefer to be offended, solicited, or assaulted in. Or, what language you want to be told to get a job, take a bath, or hurry up and die in.

Other than that, Romania is gorgeous, just like my country, and I suppose, just like the Sudan.
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Article source: http://www.dbrom.ro/articles.html?secid=5&artid=791  
 

 
   
  Laser printers

Laser printers provide the highest-quality text and images available today. They are ideal for small businesses and home offices, and there are even some reliable low-cost models that are perfect for everyday printing in your home or home office. This guide will help you decide which laser printer is right for you.

Which laser printer you choose will depend not only on how much you're willing to spend, but also on your particular requirements for print quality, speed, and special features. Here are some logical ways to narrow your choices.

Advantages of HP LaserJet printers If you are looking for a personal-desktop or home-office workhorse, consider purchasing an HP LaserJet printer. These machines are designed for the long haul. They can turn out a high volume of pages per month at fantastic speeds, and they are capable of producing extremely high-quality text and graphics (including color). Plus, they are easy to set up and use.

Resolution and color.

The standard resolution in most laser printers today is 1,200 dots per inch (DPI). This is well-suited for everyday printing, including small desktop publishing jobs. (A high-end production printer might have a resolution of 2,400 DPI.) And don't think laser means only black and white: HP offers full-color laser printers that produce crisp text, bold graphics, and vivid pictures.

Speed

Lasers still hold the high ground in terms of speed: You can get full-color results as fast as 17 pages per minute (PPM), and black-and-white output as fast as 25 PPM (or 45 PPM on high-performance machines!). But when it comes to actual printing, laser printers may take a little while to warm up. When a laser printer receives data from a computer, it takes 5 to 30 seconds to prepare the printer. This is in addition to the time it takes to actually print the document. When the printer is turned on, it needs time to warm up the fuser to operating temperature. If the printer has a standby mode or is turned off between printing jobs, the warm-up time becomes even more important. To reduce waiting time, look for a laser printer that has "instant-on" fusers, which are designed to reduce warm-up time. An instant-on fuser can deliver the first page in 15 seconds!

Paper handling, size, and capacity.

Paper handling is important when shopping for a laser printer. Most laser printers use letter-size, cut-sheet paper. Additional paper trays or feeders can be added to increase the capacity or variety of media. High-end production printers use continuous-feed paper.

Laser printers can print on a variety of papers sizes, types, and weights, such as transparencies, labels, and card stock. They can also handle non-traditional media like envelopes. But be aware that many specialty papers, such as iron-on transfers, are not suitable for laser printers, because the heat used in the transfer process can damage the paper and gum up your printer.

A laser printer with duplex printing can print on one side of the paper, then turn the paper over and print on the other side. Most laser printers, however, use the simpler manual duplex printing.

Laser printers work by shooting a laser at a rotating drum. Where the laser hits the drum, it magnetizes it, and the drum passes over some microscopic ink-dust; which gets picked up in the magnetized areas. As the drum keeps rotating a piece of paper is passed by, and underneath is an even stronger magnetic attraction, which causes the dust to jump from the drum to the paper. The paper passes by a hot "fuser" which basically melts or bonds the ink-dust into the paper.

Now laser and ink-jet printers each have different advantages and disadvantages, that can help you decide which you want to buy.

The advantage to laser printers is that they can be very fast (do many pages quickly), and they use a dry toner (ink-dust). Once the ink is fused to the paper, it doesn't fade or rub off. Toner is usually cheaper for how many copies you get out of it; but more expensive overall, just you replace it much less often.

The disadvantage is that most of them are black and white, and they tend to be bigger and more expensive. There are some color laser printers, but they tend to be even more expensive, and so most individuals don't buy them yet; being more for businesses.

Inkjet Specialty Paper

First of all, Inkjet Specialty Papers are the smooth surfaced papers whose a specially formulated coating makes an ideal platform to absorb and to fix the inks that are jetted from the inkjet printer for high quality, full color printing.

Throughout the course of ink-jet development, ink chemists and media engineers realized that when a liquid ink droplet contacts the surface of paper, it tends to spread along paper fiber lines as well as penetrate into paper sizing and voids. The spreading of ink droplets is often too excessive and too irregular to maintain the resolution required. The penetration of ink into the paper is often too slow to absorb multiple ink drops on the same spot within very short time intervals. The poor color image quality due to ink spreading and intercolor bleeding is recognized as the critical issue in the development of ink-jet technology.

To obtain a high-quality color ink-jet image, the surface of the media requires a special coating. And this's why many vendors offer customers High Quality Inkjet Papers and have a know-how in Inkjet technology by leading the consumable market with professional chemistry. By the way, the special ink-jet-coated media must balance between many design parameters such as drop volume, evaporation rate, penetration rate, coating thickness, etc. Today, because of the popularity of color ink-jet printers, the markets demand for better media such as ink-jet glossy and photo media is more significant.

How do laser printers work?

Laser Printers employ a laser beam to create an image on a drum. The light of the laser changes the electrical charge in the drum wherever it gets hit. Then, the drum is rolled onto a reservoir of toner, which is picked up by the altered portions of the drum. Consequently, the toner is being transferred to the paper by an amalgamation of heat and pressure, in the same way a photocopier operates.

Since an entire page is carried over to a drum prior to the toner application, laser printers called page printers. There are also two additional types of page printers that come into the category of laser printers, even though they do not use lasers .One uses bundles of LED's to expose the drum, then the other employs LCD's. However, both of them function like a real laser printer once the drum is charged.

One of the distinguishing features of laser printers is their resolution. The ready resolutions extent from 300 dpi (dots per inch) at the bottom end to 1,200 dpi at the top end. If you compare, offset printing normally prints at 1,200 or 2,400 dpi. Some laser printers achieve higher resolutions with distinguish techniques generally known as resolution enhancement.

A standard monochrome laser printer employs a single toner, whereas colour laser printers use four toners to print in full colour. Colour laser printers are generally about five to ten times more expensive than their monochrome siblings.

Laser printers create high-quality prints and are capable of printing an almost unlimited variety of fonts. Most laser printers have a basic set of fonts, they are called internal or resident fonts, however additional fonts can be added in more ways.

Laser printers are very able when it comes to printing graphics. However, one needs good amount of memory in the printer to print high-resolution graphics. Since, laser printers are non-impact printers, they proved to be much quieter than dot-matrix. They are faster, although sometimes not as fast as some dot-matrix printers.