Whoever says Google has poor support is wrong

I use a few of the Google tools available.  When it comes time for my monthly backups of my web stuff, I use Google Takeout.  Google Takeout creates a backup of all your Google stuff and creates one big zip file of it that you can download to your machine.

I had some trouble with it today, it wasn't generating my download file so I sent an email to their support team.  I got an email back in about five minutes:


Hi Rich,

Thanks for your mail.  We're currently working on this issue, we hope to have it resolved by next week.  Sorry for the inconvenience,

--The Takeout team

So I'll try again next week and see if its working as expected.  But overall not bad support for what is essentially a suite of free tools.

UPDATE 11/30/2013:

Another Googler got back to me and said to try again, and sure enough it worked just fine.  Problem solved.  Thanks Google.  Now get back to keeping the NSA from spying on my appetizer recipes in Google Docs.

Visual Studio using old app.config value or setting

Once in a blue moon, I will run into a problem with Visual Studio 2012 where the App.config for a console application is getting cached somewhere and there's no way to release it.  So the App.config is stuck with old values which aren't correct for the application today.  It's happened maybe twice this year to me.

The App.config in my solution shows the correct values.  The one that's been put in the output directories for Debug and Release both look good, but my quick little console application is pulling ghost values from an App.config from last week. I've tried building, rebuilding, and finally, all to no avail.

The only thing I could think of to fix this ( which did work ) was:

• Copying the contents of the App.config file from within Visual Studio
• then delete the file from within Visual Studio
• Then re-add the config file
• Then paste in the contents.
• Rebuild and run.

I'm going to chalk this one up to ghosts in the machine.  

Amazon Kindle, Expired Credit Card and Gift Card Balance issue

Ran into a weird problem with the Amazon Kindle in our household. They don't let you purchase a new book when you have an expired credit card in your one-click setup, even if you have a gift card balance on the account. We couldn't figure it out on the Kindle, so I had to login to Amazon, delete the expired credit card, and then the purchase went through with no problem via the gift card. It's funny because with so many of these devices today, when you actually have to break out the computer and go to a website, it feels jarring and old-fashioned.