Somebody Stole My $#!T!

Having your stuff stolen pretty much sucks all the way round. However, there are some positive things in rebuilding. The first thing we did was to list all of our online accounts. There were a lot, more than a page. We then worked through the list and reset all the passwords and took extra time to update other account info and to delete the ones we don't use anymore. The second benefit was to find all of our backups scattered through the house( and the cloud) and consolidate them. Then, and still, to selectively recover the data we need. For the most part this is comprised of photos and music. As iPhoto imports, I got to watch over a decade of life stream by. The first digital pictures I took, lots of trips, first house, kids, second house etc. The music was a similar walk through the past with files gleaned from ftp servers, then Napster, Audio Galaxy, Kazaa, and Oink.

I highly recommend taking the time to do this type of data house keeping before something happens, whether hardware failure or theft. If you have a Mac, you have a lot of power to secure your data and your computer. While a bit pricey, Apple's me.com accounts give you a decent amount of storage, syncing between devices, and back to my mac features. (There is speculation that this service will drop in price by as much as 100% in the near future.) For pdfs of tax returns and other types of sensitive info, you can use encrypted disk images to store them. For other things that are not as sensitive, I use Evernote to keep them. If you can do basic scripting, OSX's Automator app can help you do other security measures limited only by your creativity and time you want to spend on it.

Strangely, our burglary does not appear on the crimereports.com map. Not that I really need it, just saying…..

Oh, you will see to the right a Wolfram Alpha widget I created to compare stats on 2 Zip Codes. You can enter any two zips and get a basic geographic and demographic comparison.