Right, so, we got robbed.
Late enough Friday night for to actually be Saturday morning, someone tossed a big-ass decorative stone through our downstairs sliding glass door and made off with my laptop and my backpack, which contained a variety of other delights including my camera and some really nice headphones. Awesome.
Let’s take a look at the tape:
- Amazingly, there’s good news
- You know what I didn’t lose? Any data whatsoever, thanks to Time Machine, CrashPlan, and Dropbox. Well, mostly the first, since that was the only one I needed to reconstitute my working environment, but had the nefarious jackholes grabbed the backup drive, too, I’d have the extra backups. Food for thought.
- So how’d that go?
- I ordered a new Macbook online and scheduled in-store pickup in Highland Village. I picked it up, took it home, plugged it into my Time Machine drive, and went to this little guy’s birthday party. When I got home, my computer was basically right where I left it — browser windows and all. Beat that.
- Amusing Lesson Number 1
- You can, with a big enough check, have your glass door replaced in the middle of the goddamn night.
- Did they bring a shop vac and help clean up the glass?
- Yes, they brought a shop vac and helped to clean up the glass.
- What about Brenda? Is she really gonna move in with that guy?
- Apparently so.
- Who’s Brenda?
- I have no idea, but the glass dudes were seriously discussing it.
- So did the alarm go off?
- Nope. Somehow, the crazy single lady who lived here first didn’t think to put a glass break sensor in the room where *30% of the wall is glass**. Go figure. Yeah, fixing that ASAP.
- Amusing Lesson Number 2
- This being Texas, the cops were utterly uninterested in the (obviously, completely, totally unloaded) handgun on the entryway table once I told them it was mine and not evidence.
- Do we feel good about that safe now?
- You bet your ass.
- In which the wonders of plastics are explored
- In searching for security solutions to the back door problem, I came across the fact that 3M is doing some pretty amazing stuff with window film. Sure, they can block heat and UV, but they’ve gone much farther than that. Like, you can get stuff strong enough to prevent the “flying daggers of bloody death” hurricane feature, and that will slow down or stymie a would-be burglar. More noise and less progress is anathema to that line of work, so it may well be that we eschew the “ghetto prison” look and go for for some space-age polymers instead.
- Amusing Lesson Number 3
- If you make enough noise, ADT will promise to help you sooner than October. Score one for “firmly assertive” and “willing to take your business elsewhere”.
- Amusing Lesson Number 4
- I feel really, really good about my decision to consolidate sensitive information in 1Password now. You should seriously be considering this for your laptops, too, unless you have some sort of whole-disk encryption thing going on.
- Do you leave the laptop downstairs anymore?
- Are you fucking kidding me?
- Does your downstairs look like a holdout set from a zombie movie?
- Shut up.
I am detecting MASSIVE payoff due to comprehensive MH computer security and backup protocol. Will they basically be screwed when they try to boot up your laptop? It would be so freaking beautiful if there was some kind of Mission Impossible remote self-destruct thing you could do- maybe something that would burn the holy christ out of their hands when they go for the celebratory bootup.
Additionally, I, once again, look out at my patio where I have decoratively bordered my flower beds with baseball sized rocks and wonder how much longer before I regret it. Not real bright, I know, but it looks nice.
Oh, if only.
There is an App that allows you to takea pic of person who turns on computer ipad iphone and sends it to you. A flight friend showed me this on the way back form Cali once. Damn Chet, your neighborhood is full of thieves. I suggest french mastiff who lives downstairs.