Of course, these are our lives, especially right now.
We are all okay, and the house is secure, even more so now, but I would like to ask the SFF community for help.
Those who lost their laptops will not be able to replace these without detriment to their financial situation. These are essential for our writing, particularly over the next four weeks.
If you would like to help donate laptops or funds to those students who had their laptops stolen, please contact Leslie or Neile at infoATclarionwestDOTorg. More donation information may be forthcoming.
Thank you.
Please feel free to repost this and to link to this.
<***>
Just in case anyone sees them:
One black Dell Inspiron 1520.
One Silver colored Sager with a 17" screen.
One Silver/red Dell XPSm1710.
One Sony Vaio Sz780.
Profile
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
albionidaho- Maggie
Page Summary
- maryrobinette : (no subject) [+1]
- vylar_kaftan : (no subject) [+1]
- jimvanpelt : (no subject) [+1]
- tinaconnolly : (no subject) [+1]
- chris_reynaga : (no subject) [+1]
- rosefox : (no subject) [+5]
- aliettedb : (no subject) [+1]
- kmarkhoover : (no subject) [+1]
- tithenai : (no subject) [+1]
- pixelfish : (no subject) [+3]
- summers_place : (no subject) [+1]
- jlundberg : (no subject) [+6]
- jasonfischer : (no subject) [+1]
- icedrake : (no subject) [+3]
- katespin : laptops [+1]
- enochsmiles : (no subject) [+1]
- robwo : beyond horrid [+1]
Designed by chasethestars
chasethestars
Comments
Thank you so much :).
One Silver/red Dell XPSm1710,
One Sony Vaio Sz780
We'll report more missing items as they are found.
Nice picture. *rawr* :)
My husband and I have two Mac laptops we will gladly lend for the duration of the workshop. We're in New York but can certainly ship them out there. I wish we could just donate them but unfortunately that's not an option for us. Please let me know whether any of the students whose laptops were stolen would be willing to take loaners while you scare up replacements or funds.
I have a spare laptop but shipping it from Korea seems, er, silly, considering the expense, since that money could be donated towards replacing the original machines. Please do post on how we can help in that way once you have a system figured out. (Since I imagine insurance isn't going to cover most of the PCs...)
And here's hoping the losers don't come back.
I hope they don't come back, too!
Morons.
CW students--was a lot of data lost for all the students? As in stories, photos, etc?
It's heartbreaking.
It was broken into. It has a really nice security system, but someone found the one flaw. There are now no flaws.
(I'd be freaking out just a little--in workshop situations, I tend to get a lot done, but I don't know if I'd have my work backed up. This year I'm bringing a thumb drive for that purpose.)
It's always sad when people have to learn the "backups are good" lesson through something like this. (I've had a number of my friends have their laptops stolen in the last few years, and all of them lost something important.) But it's a good rule even if you're lucky enough to avoid ever having your laptop stolen -- laptop hard drives have extremely high failure rates relative to desktop and server hard drives, and recovering data from a dead drive will cost you at a bare minimum $500-$1000 if possible at all.
External 500GB drives are cheap these days, and well worth the investment.
(It can't help much with the feeling of security, though; I'm still working on regaining mine after I had my house burgled four years ago.) This sucks all around, and I'm sorry to hear about it.
Have you considered something along the lines of the eePC as a quick/cheap/temporary replacement?
The problem with the eePC is that some of these people use these laptops for their livelihood as well as writing. It is necessary that they have machines powerful enough to do their jobs.
Thanks for your advice!
Edited at 2008-07-05 04:44 pm (UTC)
Thanks for being such a fine friend.
JeffV
I also heard that he donated all of his workshop fee to help replace the stolen laptops.
And yes, they can still write. But they can't e-mail the stories to Kinkos to be printed off, as required. Having a laptop with a wireless card is now mandatory. And, again, some of these people have to have the machines to make money and survive.
Again, thank you for donating and for spreading the word.
But the best I could do is blog it, and pass the word to my Clarion South buddies :-) all the best and hope this one bad experience doesn't ruin a life-changing writing event.
And, to be, honest, I think that this event will end up being a really good thing in the end. We're amazed at how wonderful and supportive the SFF community has been.
Thanks for the suggestion!
And we've been watching Craigslist, etc.
Also, if you need someone to help explain the situation to the less tech-aware of the police, I'm happy to help.
Kate
If you know the registration numbers of software installed that auto-updates (which is most software, but the most frequent auto-updaters are the anti-virus suites) or have IM software set to log in automatically when connected to the 'net, and the thieves turn these on connected to a network, you should be able to recover them. I've had a lot of success with this when tech-savvy police are involved.
I'll pass this along.
But please folks don't get too judgmental about backing up. Nobody backs every word up to outside storage. And sometimes even that doesn't work. Right after my participation in CW 94, I had the "V Sign" virus jump from a university computer system to my floppy backups. Four backups. Count them. Four. And the main. All wiped at the FAT file. I'm still sick about that one.
Sick about this one, too. I hope you guys can get past it. I agree about using high tech tracing. It should be possible. Don't expect much from the police, though. Gotta find some private contacts. Also, keep an eye on ebay, craigslist, etc.
And we are keeping our eyes open :).