This is part of the lyric for the music in the Progressive.Com commercials. Having gotten married a while back, we’ve put off combining car insurance for a while. However, the time has now come. Lindsay’s policy was up for renewal, and so was mine. What better time.

I browsed around online for a while, trying to find quotes. What I found really bothered me. Most places want you to fill in all your information and then they say they’ll call you back within 24 hours. A few websites like that, and I remembered the Progressive.Com commercial.

This was far and away the best online shopping experience I’d ever had. Very straightforward. Enter your information, enter your VIN numbers, enter your violations (2 for Lindsay, none for me, thank you!) and lo and behold, there was a dollar amount on my screen.

Click purchase, enter my financial info, and then done deal. I have a link on my screen to print out temporary insurance cards along with an option to have them fax me verification of insurance. After I print them out, I notice there’s a little problem with the application (something I entered incorrectly). I click the link on the page that says “Talk to me”. I type in my phone number and within 15 seconds, my phone rings with a Progressive.Com representative on the phone ready to answer my questions.

I didn’t not have to find an 800 number, nor did I have to navigate through a minefield of options to get to the person I needed to talk to. They called me, and they were very eager to help.

Progressive has *really* nailed it with this website. This really is how life should be!

It’s been far too long since I last updated this application (almost 2.5 years), so this is really more of a formality than anything else.

With the proliferation of blog posting tools, and with the players in the game, I’ve decided to stop supporting MovablePoster. This is going to include taking down the forums, and the bug tracking database (neither of which have had any substantive activity for at least 2 years).

Thank you to everyone who did use this tool. It was a fun project while it lasted, but due to time considerations and the absolutely fantastic blog editor in MS Word 2007, it’s just not conducive to continue working or supporting this.

The best news I’ve heard in quite a while… Al Qaeda in Iraq’s leader, al-Zarqawi, has been killed in an airstrike on a building north of Baghdad. Couldn’t have happened to a better person…

This weekend I got ambitious and decided to try the beta bits of Windows Vista on my primary laptop. The install experience was fantastic, and I was up and running quickly enough. I got the remainder of the software I needed installed.

Unfortunately, I waited to install and run VMWare until the end. VMWare 5.5.1 froze up when I tried to start any VM. This was a deal breaker for me. I just wanted to run the Vista Beta, not rebuild all of my VMs, so I spent the next several hours repaving again… this time Windows XP SP2.

One of my colleagues, Alex Mueller, recently completed a set of presentations to our organization which talked about the tenets of object oriented programming. Most of the people in the room were familiar with the concepts covered, however, I think that it’s always good to go back and revisit the fundamentals.

He’s taken his presentations and created a nice set of posts on his blog. I’d encourage everyone to go read them. What I have found is that when I go back and revisit things that I’ve used quite a bit, I always tend to learn something new or remember something that I may have forgotten.

• What is an object?
• What is a class?
• What is inheritance?
• What is encapsulation?
• What is polymorphism?
• What is composition?
• What is abstraction?

Thanks for a great series, Alex…

For quite some time I’ve been looking for a way to get a nice exception dialog worked into several applications that I’ve developed. I saw that the .NET framework had a real nice one that did not bombarded the user with tons of useless information (such as a stack trace) although it was available if needed.

Unbeknownst to me until late Friday afternoon, this dialog is actually a class in the .NET framework. It’s called ThreadExceptionDialog and in its constructor takes an exception.

I’ve hooked this up into my application like this:

public static void Main(string[] args)
{
    Application.ThreadException += new ThreadExceptionEventHandler(Application_ThreadException);
    Application.Run(new Form1());
}
 
public static void Application_ThreadException(object sender, ThreadExceptionEventArgs e)
{
    using (ThreadExceptionDialog dlg = new ThreadExceptionDialog(ex))
    {
        dlg.ShowDialog();
    }
}