Dutch log

The conference in Bilbao went well as far as the company is concerned in terms of raising interest and our profile. My talk went ok I think, although there weren’t many questions. There were several speakers from well-known companies such as ask.com, netflix, and yahoo who were really interesting and gave out what I thought was some quite frank information about their recommendation systems and problems they faced, and the numbers were impressive too.

Bilbao is very green and hilly, and it rained every day I was there (with an impressive thunderstorm on one day as well), so it didn’t feel too different from the Waikato, although it was warmer. Apparently Barcelona had very heavy rain and thunderstorms as well though, so maybe it was just a storm that passed over the country and it isn’t normally that wet there.
The food in the Basque Country was great - lots of intricately made plates of snacks (”tapas” or “pintchos”), and you just take what you want from the line of dishes on the counter and pay when you’re finished.

The heavy rain on the last day over parts of the country meant that the air network was running late - my flight that was due to land at 10:20pm landed around 1am, well after the trains had stopped so I had to queue for 35 minutes for a taxi. He got a tad lost around Sant Cugat (stuck on the motorway) but when we got to the university I knew enough to figure out the way from there.

It’s another long weekend in Barcelona coming up - Monday is the Mercè Festival, celebrating the patron saint of the city. (side-note for any networking geeks… ever heard of the .cat top level domain? I didn’t know regions could get their own…)
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