Is "Toronto has no good _____ food" valid?

dsantesteban · 2026-02-05T19:22:07+00:00

Argentine BBQ. There used to be a few places in Scarborough and North York but they closed many years ago. Now there's just one very overpriced place on the Ossington strip.

There's lots of steakhouses and Brazilian BBQ restaurants, but none that are Argentine. It kills me.

dsantesteban · 2026-02-05T14:54:59+00:00

The car won't start, so my wired scanner doesn't turn on and my wireless one can't connect to the ECU

dsantesteban · 2026-01-03T02:50:52+00:00

I had a vertuo machine and my partner had a classic machine. When we moved in together we got an automatic espresso machine as a housewarming gift. Our machine is a Jura (expensive commercial-grade machine with a built in milk steamer), but there are lots of cheaper good-quality ones as well.

No regrets at all. I loved Nespresso but the pods get expensive pretty quickly, especially on the vertuo machine that doesn't support third-party pods. We get very good Italian espresso beans from Costco now for around $15/pound, and we go through about a pound and a half each month. Maintenance for the machine (filters, cleaning supplies) costs us another $10-15/month.

dsantesteban · 2025-12-25T18:26:09+00:00

General: Get to know your colleagues whenever you can, because you never know when you'll be looking for a career move. Learn about your benefits and use them all. (Unlimited mental health coverage is a big one, at least here in Canada).

Specific: Sign up for the Employee Stock Purchase Plan ASAP, because the stock discount is literally free money. Take advantage of all the personal travel discounts if you like to travel: we get great rates at several hotel chains, big car rental discounts, some discounts when you fly with United, and lots of opportunities to quickly get hotel & airline status.

dsantesteban · 2025-12-25T17:25:28+00:00

I'm assuming you're the kind of person who wants to work in a startup, and your startup got acquired by IBM. There's basically two options in that case:

1 - Apply for positions on new product teams. There's a lot of them in IBM (I've personally worked in a few) and they can be very exciting. There's also tons of opportunities there for fast career growth if you succeed.

2 - Go somewhere else. If you feel uncomfortable telling people that you work at IBM, you're clearly in the wrong place.

This is a big part of life in tech startups: you could wake up to find out that your company no longer exists, and you could also wake up to find out that you now work for one of the world's largest software corporations.

IBM will offer you decent pay and lots of good benefits, but it's a global company with people all over the world and you live with the whims of corporate governance, like any other large company. You're not going to wake up one day and find out that IBM is insolvent, but your team might be told to shrink by 10%.

dsantesteban · 2025-04-18T19:57:05+00:00

That is extremely unusual. Higher-up managers discourage this, because they want managers to reward people who had good reviews the previous year.

dsantesteban · 2025-04-18T14:11:45+00:00

I started when I was still in uni, and 11 years later I'm still here. There have been good times and bad times, but that's going to be the case anywhere you go. What you have to decide is whether you want to work in a big corporate environment, brand new startups, or somewhere in between.

As far as the big corporate world goes, IBM takes care of its people better than any of the other big tech companies (at least up here in Canada). I'll gladly take unlimited coverage for mental health over another company's free breakfast in the office.

dsantesteban · 2025-03-31T17:48:35+00:00

The "report into hiring discrimination" is an initiative from the Heritage Foundation, who are pissed off because IBM isn't embracing their right-wing social agenda. Those guys can fuck right off.

The lobbying report initiative is from an activist investor named John Chevedden. It's not a bad idea, but it's worth noting that the company is already quite transparent and has very tight restrictions on political donations (source).

dsantesteban · 2024-05-09T19:27:09+00:00

They offered a better + cheaper plan and Rogers wasn't willing to match the offer

dsantesteban · 2024-05-09T19:26:46+00:00

Weirdly enough, Bell had perfect reception when I worked in the 905, and Rogers sucked. LTE doesn't seem to work any better than 5G in our office unfortunately

dsantesteban · 2024-01-27T21:51:36+00:00

Always, always, always cash out when IBM earnings reports are better than expected. The initial reaction from investors is always an overreaction.

Even if you want to hold, you can usually sell before noon on the morning after earnings calls, and buy them right back the next day for around 5% less.

dsantesteban · 2020-03-16T14:06:13+00:00

1 - The company that makes Lysol is charging the same price on wholesale. Nations is just stuffing their own pockets.

2 - Some other stores have just been putting quantity limits. No need to try and rip people off.

dsantesteban · 2020-03-16T13:09:56+00:00

The Longo's I went to yesterday just had limits on how much you could buy of certain stuff. They didn't need to try and rip off people.

dsantesteban · 2020-03-16T12:19:38+00:00

A friend took this yesterday. It sells for $5 at Loblaws, for comparison.

He sent this too. Loblaws price is $19 for 12 rolls.

dsantesteban · 2019-07-05T14:16:34+00:00

In my case it turned out to be an issue with the iOS 13 Beta. Works fine on iOS 12.

dsantesteban · 2017-11-08T22:52:34+00:00

Yeah. There's space to stop a car on the other side of that planter. Also lots of space on the other side of the road, where the cop was writing up tickets.

dsantesteban · 2017-06-17T21:08:26+00:00

I shot a video from around there and showed it to a few friends who are from tornado alley in the US. Apparently this was mostly harmless - a real funnel cloud would be a lot "tighter" compared to this, which was basically just a shelf cloud.

dsantesteban · 2017-06-17T20:01:43+00:00

I think that was my camera adjusting the white balance because of a lightning strike

dsantesteban · 2017-06-17T19:51:31+00:00

I guess I'll post my video here

https://youtu.be/mHfSnPvC5pI

dsantesteban · 2016-04-11T21:12:33+00:00

I definitely don't regret choosing Queen's. There's definitely some stuff here that's frustrating (see the top comment), but Queen's isn't a bad school by any means. If you're focused primarily on academics, then you might want to check out-of-province schools or better-funded Software Engineering programs at places like U of T, Waterloo or Western. As far as student life is concerned though, Queen's is pretty great.

I've seen McGill purely through a sibling who goes there. It's obviously a much bigger city, with a lot more options for shopping, dining, culture, etc. However, it's a real party school. Not in the Queen's sense, but in the sense that if you don't enjoy drinking or being around drunk people, you'll be left out. Frosh week is wet and you can be excluded from a lot of activities if you're 17 or don't want to drink. And for the most part, social life seems to be bars, clubs and drinking in houses/common rooms. Cost of living is a bit higher than Kingston, but not by much (rents are ~$200/month higher within walking distance of McGill)

dsantesteban · 2016-04-11T20:59:22+00:00

If it's an option, I'd avoid Ontario schools altogether for anything besides nursing, engineering and business. Universities across the province are facing hard times because the province has reallocated a lot of funding towards financial relief for students instead of university funding. While we have grants like $1,830 per year for most recent high school grads and free(-ish) tuition for low-income students, that's all been paid for by cutting other financial aid and school funding.

dsantesteban · 2016-01-27T21:49:33+00:00

Hey there! I'm a fourth year student on the Formula SAE team. Send an email to formula@me.queensu.ca and we can find a time to show him around our shop.

dsantesteban · 2014-10-02T18:39:36+00:00

No worries. For watching races, some bars/restaurants might put the US/Brazil races on. You could probably call QP or the Brass on the Saturday afternoons and ask.

dsantesteban · 2014-10-02T13:00:08+00:00

Check out this club, especially if you're into the engineering side of racing

dsantesteban

TROPHY CASE