yikes – I live in a blacklisted country

I don’t think I’ve ever come across this before, but I responded to an email sent to me from a public library in the US and was surprised to receive the following delivery failure message…

SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
host csplspam.xxxxxxxx.lib.ia.us [xxx.xxx.160.30]:
557 Your IP address is from a blacklisted country. Disconnecting.

…I know spam’s a serious problem, but isn’t blocking all email from a whole European country kind of excessive?
:-S

Go Danbury, Go!

Congratulations to Danbury Library in Connecticut for being the first to add LibraryThing for Libraries to their live OPAC!
For anyone wondering if it works with the Dynix/Horizon HIP OPAC, let me tell you that it works a treat 🙂
In completely unrelated news, one of my work colleagues visited Grimsby today. A quick look at Wikipedia and I was able to amaze her with the fact that Grimsby produces more pizzas than anywhere else. Not only that, it looks like Grimsby has been making pizzas since the Dark Ages:

Hmmmmmmm… Medieval Margarita with 6 slices of Mozzarella!

Was I really in Barcelona last week?

We only got back from Barcelona 3 days ago and already it seems more like it was 3 weeks ago. There’s nothing like 400 unread emails in your inbox to make you forget about what you were doing the week before!!!
For those of you who enjoy looking at holiday photographs, there’s nearly 400 of mine on Flickr, or you can find all the conference photos here. Tim from Birkbeck has also been adding Barcelona photos to Flickr. Tim’s head also appears in this serendipity photograph taken late on the Wednesday evening in a random bar — someone’s (maybe Chris from Lincoln?) hand got in the way and I can almost here a voice saying “I will crush you!” in the background 😀
day5_205
The 4 presentations I took part in are available at: https://library.hud.ac.uk/barcelona
The list of Library 2.0 examples used in the Web 2.0 session is:

…phew — hopefully there was something of interest in that little lot! I’m sure were at least a hundred more examples I could have included and, if you’ve got a good one, please post a comment with the details 🙂
The plan is to gather together all of the presentations from the conference and add them to the wiki. It’s currently branded the “Dynix User Group UK” wiki but, once the various European User Groups start to come together, I’m sure it will get a more generic title — I quite like SLUG (SirsiDynix Libraries User Group), although that’s quite similar to SMUG (SFX & MetaLib User Group).
Don’t forget, if you’re a SirsiDynix library in the north of England (Unicorn, Dynix, or Horizon), there’s a meeting at the University of Bradford on May 17th. A trip to the (in)famous Kashmir Restaurant for a curry is on the cards for those who attend 🙂