Archive for April, 2008

IIS and Unknown MIME Types

Today I encountered a very weird issue with IIS 6.0. I added an ISO file to a website, and every time I tried to download it, a 404 error was thrown. After some googling, I found that the problem was because the ISO extension has no MIME type in IIS 6.0. Why IIS throws a 404 (Not Found), I don’t know…

YSlow

I know I am probably the last person on the web to find this, but YSlow is a sweet Firefox/Firebug plugin for analyzing web site performance. It basically analyzes the best practices Yahoo laid out for speeding up websites. Nifty tool, go download it. Word to Bulman who never informed me of it.

Pleasant surprise…from Microsoft?

After almost a year, my time had come. A couple days ago, I went to turn on my XBox 360 and received the red circle of death. Unlike Nintendo, no amount of blowing on the cartridge was going to fix this (…that’s what she said). I knew Microsoft would repair it, but I was dreading the repair request process.

After attempting to request the repair online, with little success due to 500 errors on the XBox website, I decided I had to call. (Just a little background on me, I hate calling anyone, so I was not happy). At first, I was met by an IVR named Max that was actually fun to talk to, and that kind of scares me actually. After that, I was immediately directed to a support representative who was fast, courteous, and down-right awesome. Overall, the experience was the exact opposite from what I expected of one of the largest companies in the world. Even though I doubt all divisions of Microsoft would have the same response, its nice to know that even a large company knows what their customers want.

This customer support shows me that Microsoft is truly dedicated to their XBox 360 product, which keeps me going out and buying games for it. In addition to the repair, I get a free month of XBox live. Even though I didn’t expect or care about this, it makes me feel wanted as a customer.

High-five to Microsoft for once.