Xerox, Upverter and Blue Jays - 03/05/2016
The study tour Beyond Frontiers is now fully started and this day's programme was maximally full. With an early rise and shine at 7:00 AM and after enjoying the breakfast, our group took off to the first company of the day: Xerox Research Center Canada. The mini vans picked up yesterday were used to get us all to the center which was located outside downtown Toronto. Cd's with music were distributed over the 4 minivans in a random way and our van happened to have some nice gangster rap music, so with pumping beats we left the hostel.
Once arrived at the futuristic facility of Xerox, we got a general introduction presentation whereafter the group got split in two: one group was led towards printing laboratories and the other group to a control room. After a quick lunch we continued our tight program with the next company: Upverter. This (startup) company was located downtown Toronto inside a regular house which was quite contrary to the visit of Cisco yesterday, located in a 4 floor office in a skyscraper. Upverter consists of 5 people who work together on an online pcb layout design tool. The reception was in a very friendly and informal way. They gave us a talk including a demo about Upverter's work. Moreover, beer was arranged by them, so everyone could listen while enjoying that. Then, they said it was time to go to their conference room which turned eventually out to be a cafe where more beers were enjoyed. We had a good time over there and around 17:00 it was time to go back to the hostel to drop off our bags before going to the Blue Jays!
The Blue Jays are Toronto's baseball team playing in the Major League. We had tickets for the match against the Texas Rangers. Having a quick dinner on the go we arrived at the Rogers Stadium. The day went until that moment pretty smooth with no complications, but then we saw that our tickets were for the wrong date. Luckily this could be fixed easily and we were able to enter the stadium. The match lasted for eventually 10 innings, 3,5 hrs play time in total. 7 innings no points were scored by the teams leading to quite some people getting bored and sleepy with even a person of our group ragequitting the game. However the last part of the game was the best with 2 homeruns by the Blue Jays which led to their victory! 3-1 was the end score and with this all being said, the end of the blog is reached for today.
By: Maurice Baveco