Latex and Letter Paper

Very rarely do I work on a system that has the correct defaults setup to produce letter paper. The steps to get everything coming out nice and "letterpaperish" are:

1. Specify letterpaper in the documentclass command
2. Specify the paper size when converting from dvi such as: dvips -t letter mydoc.dvi -o mydoc.ps

A (slightly) more detailed description of this is available at C.U. Boulder's A4 paper vs. letter paper.