Fabbrication

The press-lead rush to widen a freeway into Portland fails to make incentive for more scalable and sustainable transportation and lifestyle choices. In fact, it subsidizes the opposite. More single occupant cars honking into the city, slurping oil (ah, the expensive teat of Iraq).

On two recent mornings, I've woken up to read articles posted on the Oregonian online which tell us of the urgency in widening the Interstate 5 freeway in North Portland.

There is a choke-point here, we are told. Commuters' nerves are at stake! What will happen to the economy if trucks can't get through!? (Maybe they'll travel at night when the commuters have gone to bed in Vancouver?)

A new remote storage and offline backup site, adrive.com, recently launched and is offering 50 GB of free online storage. From the site:

ADrive ... leads the free online data storage community, offering the largest amount of free storage on the Internet. We provide our users with secure solutions for storing, backing up, and accessing files from virtually anywhere, at any time. ADrive serves as an online, centralized vault for all file types including: music, videos, photos, documents, and more.

This site is currently in the beta phase, so we can expect them to be rolling out new features in the future.

In case anyone else signed up for Paperless Billing on their American Express card gets a late fee this month, there is a problem with their servers which is causing alert enrollments to fail.

Image One. I select payment due alerts, and click Enroll.

Image Two. A window pops up but fails to load properly (server reset). Going back to alerts page shows that enrolling for the email alerts failed. I tried multiple times (I'm using Firefox v1.5.0.3).

Mohini (id 79480) with American Express Online Services, confirmed that there is a server issue and I should retry in 24 hours. I did get a late fee as I did not pay on time (didn't get the usual email that reminds me to), but American Express was very courteous in reversing that fee.