I just visited Progressive’s Drive Insurance web site to try to get auto insurance quotes. I can enter my zip code, and the fact that I’m looking for car insurance, but the party’s over when I click the button to request quotes:

Unfortunately, we cannot provide you with a quote online. We require that you have Internet Explorer version 6.0 or newer to get a quote online. Our systems indicate that your browser is an older version or does not otherwise meet this requirement. We apologize for the inconvenience.

This isn’t a complete surprise, as I’m using Safari on Mac OS X. So I fired up Firefox instead.

No luck there, either — they really have hard-coded their site for IE. How ironic is it that a company named “Progressive” has such a late 1990′s approach to web site design? I honestly don’t remember the last web site I visited that just refused to work with non-IE browsers. I mean, even Microsoft’s own web sites don’t require IE.

I’ve just learned of a Birmingham BarCamp that’s being organized for August 25-26, and I’m thinking about attending.

To be honest, although I’ve heard of the BarCamp idea before, I don’t know a lot about them. I know that they were instituted in response to the closed, invitation-only Foo Camp that O’Reilly sponsors every year. The primary rule of Bar Camp is that all of the attendees must give a demo, or make a presentation, or at least help with one. So I’d need to come up with something to present, and that shouldn’t be too tough, although it appears that most of the propsed (or requested) sessions so far seem to focus on web stuff.

My MacBook has supposedly just arrived at the FedEx location in Anchorage. Wonder how fast their planes fly, and if it will make it to Huntsville by tomorrow?