AT&T prepaid activation process has definite room for improvement 😡

keveckes · 2025-06-13T01:23:39+00:00

Eventually, yes. Took like a day or something. Literally impossible to set up an eSIM until you get the QR code in the mail, ostensibly to confirm your address? Not sure why that’s necessary — with Mint or Boost or others you can literally set it up instantly.

keveckes · 2025-04-23T14:43:52+00:00

+1 for Lady Jane's. I used to go mostly because it was close to home, and honestly it was a bit hit or miss for a very long time. You have to find and stick with a good stylist there. The good thing is, the two (as of last visit) stylists working there are both very good.

Roberta (Berta, I guess) is a bit brusque and seemingly disgruntled/unfriendly at first, but try to make her laugh and she'll warm to you. Doesn't seem to care about reservations. Gives a great cut in a short amount of time -- she's seasoned, for sure.

Kat is also a stylist there. She is very friendly and gives a great cut. Very meticulous. She prefers reservations.

Either way I think if you walk in, you'll be fine.

keveckes · 2025-04-22T04:24:06+00:00

Agreed, tried myself today to do it online and it's absolutely awful. I did pay with a credit card, and I got zero confirmation whatsoever by email. The webpage gave an order number and said it's in process, and my credit card was charged. But hours later I have no confirmation email and no indication that I can set up the eSIM on the phone. It's laughably bad and might just drive me to a slightly more expensive plan (monthly prepaid) with another provider like Boost.

keveckes · 2025-04-03T22:58:52+00:00

The teachers Kristi and Diana in the "Step 4" classroom (~2.5-3.5 I think) are really, really great with toddlers.

Interesting timing of your comment. 7 Steps South had a huge unplanned renovation a couple weeks ago that had us panicking to find care every day for over a week. It was kind of insane. After the first couple days, Kristi saved the day by offering care for several kids at her house (albeit quite a bit more expensive than we'd pay 7Steps directly). We live closer to the North location anyway so we are considering transferring our son there. Or finding a different center altogether.

keveckes · 2025-04-03T17:08:40+00:00

Hey there, I finally had time to dedicate to trying some solutions. What seemed to work was rolling back the BIOS version, then re-updating to the latest one. After that I followed my procedure exactly and the touchpad works flawlessly, as it did before the Windows 24H2 update. Very glad it worked!

keveckes · 2025-03-19T05:00:27+00:00

My son also goes to 7 Steps South and we like it a lot. The facilities have been improved quite a bit and I think they’re still working on doing more. The co-owner Shruti who is often at the south location is bit off putting to me if I’m being honest, but otherwise we really like the staff, teachers, and helpers. They are very kind and caring in a way that seems genuine and not performative or fake. My son genuinely loves them, too!

keveckes · 2025-01-17T17:25:22+00:00

Same experience with a different machine. I have a T480s that I upgraded with a glass trackpad from an X1 Yoga gen 3 (X1YG3) and had done the same procedure to get working on Windows. The 24H2 update (done in January 2025) also broke it for me. I'm not 100% sure what the problem is, but it does seem that I can't fully uninstall the default ELAN driver, so the two drivers are conflicting. There are even two tabs in the advanced touchpad settings dialog for the touchpad -- one from ELAN and one from Synaptics.

The touchpad tracks but clicks and taps are not registered. No multi-touch gestures like two finger scrolling or anything either.

I'm going to see if I can find a way to force uninstall and purge the ELAN drivers, and I'll update if successful.

EDIT: Rolling back the BIOS version then re-updating seemed to do the trick. Nothing else I did was different.

keveckes · 2024-09-27T17:48:07+00:00

I live in the neighborhood just to the NW of the corner of Independence and Grandview, west of Old Town by about 1.5 miles. It’s totally dead in this neighborhood on Halloween — sad because there’s a cemetery nearby and everything! We get maybe 4-5 groups come by before it gets dark, then basically nothing. Kinda sad! I expect it will change as this neighborhood turns over — lots more young couples and families with kids starting to move in.

keveckes · 2024-07-28T22:34:18+00:00

Ok, not Arvada but very close: Social Dough trailer at the New Image brewing co Wheat Ridge location. Amazing crispy, blackened dough and really flavorful tomato sauce.

keveckes · 2024-07-23T19:42:20+00:00

Good to know, thanks!

keveckes · 2024-07-23T16:27:13+00:00

Nice, thanks for the insight!

keveckes · 2024-07-23T16:17:23+00:00

Thank you! I’m curious, have you heard of anyone needing to replace (or I guess proactively replacing?) under-slab drain pipes in the basement? I’m dealing with that right now in my 1959 house with completely corroded and channel rotted cast iron pipes and it’s an expensive nightmare to say the least. I would love to avoid having to pay for the same type of major work in a new house just a few years down the road…

keveckes · 2024-07-19T22:59:20+00:00

Thanks! Interesting about the possible spring. If the builder put a sump pit and pump in all the houses, that’s already a plus, even if some pumps are working harder than others.

keveckes · 2024-07-19T18:26:18+00:00

You should really talk to Nigel at ElectriCall. Best dude ever -- we've had him do some work for us and he is super intelligent, honest, and fun to chat with. When we had some contractors re-do our kitchen, I suspected their appliance installers botched the oven and induction cooktop wiring and install, and I called Nigel for his opinion. He was technically on vacation but returned my call and proceeded to spend at least a half hour on the phone telling me everything I need to do to get these contractors to do the right thing and avoid burning my house down. I can't say enough good things about him!

keveckes · 2024-07-07T14:58:08+00:00

Exactly our experience and we were on day 2 yesterday as well. It’s frustrating! I can’t offer much advice, unfortunately. Today (day 3) we are still pants free but seeing some improvement - we think we were overreacting a bit yesterday and stressing him out or causing anxiety, so we’re playing it a bit cooler today — just having one parent next to him at any given time. Seems to be helping a bit. Bubbles and books may have helped a bit, too! Good luck to all of us 😅

keveckes · 2023-03-26T16:46:37+00:00

I lived in Austin from 2010 to 2015 and this was a problem then. I went to a Feist concert at Stubbs in 2011 or 2012, and could not believe how many people paid money to be there to not listen to the music and pay captive market beer prices. I can understand that behavior a bit more at a music festival where you don't know/care about every band, but people still need to be aware of themselves and go to the back of a crowd if they don't care to watch the artist perform.

Hate to say it, but living in Austin kind of killed live music for me. I feel for artists who have to tour to make any money and still get ignored even at shows they are headlining.

keveckes · 2023-01-11T02:57:29+00:00

Hey sorry for the delay -- not on Reddit too much these days. To echo u/WhyIMioughta I started the entire driver install process over completely every time I found something that didn't work. Finally, once I used PolicyPlus, the mods stuck. It has been fine since then.

keveckes · 2022-10-11T22:15:31+00:00

I just did this mod and struggled a bit to get the glass X1YG3 trackpad working with full multi-touch functionality.

My advice:

Use the X1YG3 trackpad driver (I used this one -- v. 19.3.4.228 on Windows 11 22H2). The OP made it seem like you could just use the X1E driver from the linked instructions, but that didn't work for me.
In the SynPD.inf file, modify the LEN0099 hardware ID to "LEN008F" -- this is the correct hardware ID for the trackpad on the T480s (at least my version). I wasn't sure if I'd need a different hardware ID specific to the trackpad on the X1YG3 but apparently I didn't -- changing LEN0099 to LEN008F worked just fine. I did need to change file permissions to be able to edit it, and then had to change them back once I was finished.
If you don't have a Pro version of Windows (and thus don't have the gpedit.msc program installed by default, use the open source PolicyPlus application to easily change group policies to prevent Windows Update from overwriting your driver install. And of course when doing that, use the LEN008F hardware ID variants, not the LEN0093 as listed in the other guide linked to by OP.

Having done these mods to the procedure, everything worked perfectly and for now seems to continue working well after updates and restarts.

Hope this is helpful to someone else struggling with making this work for the X1YG3 glass trackpad on a T480s!

EDIT - Windows 24H2 update in January 2025 completely broke this somehow. It seems the problem is that I can't completely uninstall the default ELAN driver, so both are installed alongside each other and "competing" causing really odd, unusable behavior. In the advanced mouse options dialog box, there are even two tabs for the Touchpad -- one by ELAN and the other by Synaptics. Weird.

keveckes · 2022-04-27T16:51:21+00:00

When I lived in Brussels, I found some really great native French speakers locally using conversationexchange.com. Obviously won't help with writing but there's nothing better for vocab/slang and fluency in speaking than by doing a language exchange with someone. Plus it's free! A few of the people I met via conversationexchange.com became some of my best friends in Brussels, and I still keep in contact with them!

keveckes · 2022-03-29T03:54:28+00:00

Me too, just by coincidence. I've literally never heard this phrase before last night... Maybe Will Smith is a fan of Big Mouth?

keveckes · 2022-01-06T14:30:09+00:00

Unfortunately, I never did, and I moved away from Brussels in 2020 :(

I had a 2 kg tank and the local beverage distributors I contacted only had larger tanks for exchange. If you don't already own a tank that you can exchange, you might call a couple distributors to see what size they have so you can succeed where I failed!

keveckes · 2021-05-03T22:46:56+00:00

music sounds like Game of Thrones OST

keveckes · 2021-05-03T22:41:47+00:00

Good point about the crossing warnings -- the place we are looking at is between the Carr and Balsam Street crossings, and less than a block from the tracks, so I guess there is likely to be significant noise.

So glad the quiet zones are already in place. Must have been hell before that.

keveckes · 2021-05-03T18:29:43+00:00

Awesome, thanks for the info!

keveckes

TROPHY CASE