...OR Not.

Sometimes, we can't even imagine the impact of the choices we make. Way back when whomever was deciding on two-letter initials for all of the states, my home state, Oregon, was assigned "OR." Logical, it's the first two letters of the state name, and there are no other states that start with those two letters (unlike, say, Alabama {AL} and Alaska {AK}). Enter the technology age, though, where computers read OR as, well, OR, as in this OR that. When I lived in Oregon, if I wanted to do a search on something in my state (say, a dial-up Internet access node), I either had to spell the name out, or use a ZIP code or telephone area code to get what I wanted.

I'll bet this is probably the issue behind this problem, where Oregon isn't showing up as a valid state in a list of eligible locations for a free trial EarthLink account.