Posting has been down for awhile but it hardly mattered - I was in Toronto and wouldn't have posted anyway. The trip from Allentown to 'the big city,' as they call it in CPD, is in a tiny Beech 1900 but offers a pretty great fly-over of the skyline along the north shore of Lake Ontario. We were there on business, though, so the first order of, well, business was to scope out Knoll's Toronto custom product development group. We saw similarities and differences, or at least that is the company line. In point of fact we saw some things that we would have liked to have seen already and some that appeared to us to be previews of coming attractions. In the afternoon we went on a plant tour. Knoll Toronto makes wood office systems and they are awesome. Matched-grain veneers of any wood you can find, literally, processed sequentially so that every vertical drawer front or panel is perfectly aligned with the one directly above it and the one directly below it.
Tuesday evening Ryan and I went downtown. A cab let us out at the base of the CN Tower on Front Street and we wandered the Theater District looking for a restaurant and finding Bandido's, an impressively tasty Mexican joint. We sat on the deck and had a great meal then scouted out the area, stopping at couple of bars and eventually hitting Second City's free improv. Later we walked east, past the Skydome, CN Tower, and Air Canada Centre to the Hockey Hall of Fame (where we peered into the trophy room through first-floor windows) and the market where Anthony and I had dinner when we got to Toronto on Easter of 2001.
Wednesday was kind of a long day despite a little bit of a late start. We wrapped up our exploration in CPD up there then headed to the airport with time allotted for customs, which translates into lots of sitting around waiting. By the time we were back in Macungie it was nearly 10 o'clock and Thursday was an early start as I needed to be into the office by 6 to start our work sample.
Friday, June 09, 2006