I’m attending an internal IBM conference this week at IBM Research in Yorktown. While I don’t expect anything as personally interesting as the Ben Zander talk at TLE, I did get a chance to satisfy an urge on my way from JFK to the hotel.
Most people coming to a conference in Westchester County choose to fly into White Plains or LaGuardia, because of the shorter drive. I usually choose Kennedy, and there are two reasons. One, of course, is that I can get a nonstop, and that saves me time and removes one source of problems. But the other is that I can stop in Valley Stream and visit Ralph’s Italian Ices.
It’s not far out of the way, though there’s often a long line (tonight, it was 15 minutes long, and it wasn’t even a hot night). But it’s worth it — we just don’t have anything like it at home. I just wish I’d known about Ralph’s the entire time we were visiting Diane’s family in Valley Stream; we only discovered them about five years ago — that’s twenty-five years of visits wasted. At least in one sense.
And I have the return flight on Thursday afternoon, and then another trip next week…but I still won’t make a dent in the flavor list.
from the IBM Almaden library. I found it interesting, but I was disappointed when I realized I couldn’t take the StrengthsFinder assessment, since the secret code was in the book jacket, which I didn’t have.
so I could take the test. This evening, I sat down at my trusty Mac to take the test, entered the secret code, and ran into a dead end — the page which asked for my ethnicity offered no “Next” button.