Well, Delft didn’t happen.  Or rather, it did, as I’m reasonably sure that the combined mental powers of the residents and daily visitors to Delft fix it firmly in existence, but I was not one of those daily visitors.  Since arriving in Rotterdam I’ve had this persistent and obnoxious chesty-coughy-congestion thing going on which has limited my enjoyment of the bicycle-related pleasures of the Netherlands.  Also it has limited my enjoyment of things like walking up stairs, walking at all, and failing to annoy the everliving hells out of my very patient roommate.  Yes, I’m that roommate.  The horrible coughing one.  Even I hate me.

Nope, today we all took a subway ride out to the Woudestein campus of Erasmus University, where a guest lecturer taught us about her work on providing electronic access to audio files, first by digitizing them and second by using computerized voice recognition patterns to transcribe them, with timestamps for ease of searching.  There are some very cool and very powerful algorithms going on behind the scenes, and some really amazing applications for things like preserving (and creating access to) audio recordings of WWII and Holocaust survivors.

After we subwayed back to the hotel, most of the group headed off to Delft, but I and several other people stayed behind.  A reasonably lazy day was had, including a nap and a charming dinner at Soif, a lovely nearby restaurant.  While there was still a bit too much cheese and meat, they did at least seem to have a nodding acquaintance with vegetables–salads and spinach ravioli were on offer.  Although I’m pretty sure the crinkle-cut carrots were initially frozen.  Baby steps, people.  Baby steps.