I was working on a document and expected to take a few hours ... so I thought, why not try a longer neural network training session to see if I could break past 98% performance.
The neural network architecture and training was boosted to:
300 hidden layer nodes
30 training epochs
rotate training images +/- 10 degrees.
That took about 3 hours on my laptop!
The resultant performance did indeed break the previous record .. at 98.03%