In which I lose the originals of the last three months of comics and the laptop I create them with.

Posted on by

I draw all my comics on paper, but I scan and process them on my lovely Fujitsu Lifebook P1510, a tiny hybrid tablet computer (it’s the size of a hardback book). I have high-resolution versions of all the comics, which I use for print versions and shirts and such. I used to save them to my Linux desktop, but recently I’ve been moving around a lot and I got in the habit of saving the comic files on my laptop. I’d gotten lazy about backing them up as I drew them, as evidenced by this exchange with the xkcd sysadmin last night:

18:02 <davean> Also, is [the high-res backup collection] up to date?

18:02 <xkcd> nope [Editor's note: here I was recognizing how guilty I should feel about this. I was answering casually because I knew both of us knew this was stupid and we didn't need to go over it again.]

18:02 <xkcd> I’m now sending in computer for repair

18:02 <xkcd> I’ll update the files when I back up the laptop later today

My laptop has had some hardware problems, so I was backing it up before I sent it in to Fujitsu to get it fixed. I was repartitioning my Linux desktop’s drive to make room for the files, and since that was taking a while I decided to go to sleep and finish the (months-overdue) backup when I woke up. Then, files nice and safe, I could send it to Fujitsu.

I slept in until about 1:25 PM. I’m a heavy sleeper, which explains why I didn’t wake up when, at 12:55 PM, someone forced opened a window to my apartment, came into my room, and stole my laptop off my desk within arm’s reach of where I was sleeping.

So, I have no laptop now. I think I can still manage to do comics on schedule (sans tablet screen or any sort of speed) via the cheap old XP machine I set up for that purpose during the repair. And I still have the pencil-and-ink copies of everything. But I do all the editing, arranging, coloring, etc. on the computer. The full versions of, for example, the recent kite comic, the Lisp comic, the Richard Stallman comic, and everything else since around New Year’s? Gone.

Nothing else was stolen except a little cash from my wallet. The police came and filed reports. There were a couple other burglaries in the complex on the same day. If it’s picked up they’ll call me, but I’m not holding my breath. If anyone sees it for sale on eBay, it’s a Fujitsu Lifebook P1510D with an extended battery pack, off-brand charger, and all the little logos removed. Sigh.

For the folks suggesting ways of tracking it online: my cryptography-geek security paranoia was canceled out by my laziness. I set up all sorts of ideas for dealing with stolen laptops, but never actually maintained them (after all, they were just paranoia). A year ago I bought wherethehellismylaptop.com, with the idea that every time it got online it could (securely) update the site with information about where it was and who was using it. But I never set that up. I have it automatically log in to a VPN, and I should be able to see it that way. But the VPN had stopped connecting a few weeks ago and I didn’t fix it. I’ll keep an eye out in case it phones home. I had also planned to make stickers that says “CONTAINS GPS, WILL BE TRACKED IF STOLEN,” (bluffing) but that’s part of my xkcd stickers plan that’s on a back burner right now.

Other than the comics, there’s not much that’s irreplaceable. But the laptop did contain assorted xkcd shipping records from last year (before I moved to the online system). Fortunately, there is no financial information about anyone (except me), but it did have the addresses I’ve shipped shirts to. And I had just removed the system passwords so the Fujitsu guys would be able to work on it. But I expect it’s just gonna be wiped and sold anyway. It was a mess — I’d be surprised if anyone else can use it.

And lastly, my roommates got me a RoboRaptor for Christmas, some sort of mini version of the popular toy you see everywhere. And I can’t help but notice that during the burglary it sat on the shelf and did nothing but watch. Fucking raptors. I guess it should have at least served as a reminder to never let ground-level windows go unsecured.

Fortunately, the place is a huge mess, so the thief didn’t spot my digital camera on the floor. It contains the results of a physics experiment involving 50 gallons of water and a parking deck that I’ll blag about later.

Edit: I know the lost data is my own damn fault, and it’s not so bad. I’m a lot more upset about the break-in while I was here and the loss of the laptop than the — rarely used — high-res comic files. I just want to share the awful irony that it was just when I was about to get back on track with backups that it happened.

I have also, in the past, been that obnoxious backup guy — the one who insists we back things up both here and here every six hours in case there’s a terrorist attack AND a tornado at the same time. So I feel even dumber about this.

Regarding offers of donations — thank you, I appreciate the support. But I should be able to replace the laptop. I feel like if this is the worst problem you have, you’re doing okay, you know?

Edit #2:

(Thanks to Matthew.)

157 thoughts on “In which I lose the originals of the last three months of comics and the laptop I create them with.”

  1. That sucks terribly. I’ll keep an eye out for it; make sure to contact pawn shops (if the cops haven’t already) and look on craigslist and ebay.

  2. That’s.. OHH! The.. OHHH! Well that’s terrible, I’m sorry it happened. I hope you can somehow find it.. maybe the Linux will scare them and they’ll just leave it somewhere easy to find. Sending condolences, it’s NOT nice to be invaded like that!

  4. Not totally relevant here since you’re using a PC, but there’s a very similar service for Mac OS X machines:
    http://orbicule.com/undercover/

    Fortunately none of my Macs have been stolen yet, but they have some pretty good stories… though who knows, I live in the Mission and lost a window to gunshot yesterday afternoon (!!)

  5. Wow. That really sucks. I had my wallet stolen from me a few months ago and that was traumatic — losing my computer would be beyond traumatic. I hope that they find it. Are you needing a fundraiser to help fund the new compy?

  6. A very similar thing happen to a friend of mine last fall. He was up late coding in a student lounge, fell asleep sitting up for about 15 minutes, and woke up to find his Macbook gone.

    I hope your laptop somehow finds it way back to you!

  8. Oh no! That really sucks. I vote for a collection to help replace your laptop. a Paypal link perhaps? I always look forward to new xkcd comics.

  9. A friend of mine, whose laptop is his primary machine, recently lost his NTFS MFT to some sort of accident. The data was on the drive, just not accessible. He spent ~4 days on my desktop (over the span of a week plus) running various recovery programs, until finally GetDataBack retrieved his files.

    After the rest of us learned that he had ten years of music compositions on that drive and no backup, we went pretty nuts on that, to the point of offering him blank media so his music would always have a safe place. As soon as he finished the recovery, he burned the important stuff out to DVD.

    A week later, he and the laptop tumbled down some stairs, crushing it.

    I’m not really sure what the point of the story was, but it has something to do with Murphy’s law.

    Lifebooks are nice, too. I hope you find something awesome to replace it.

  11. Very sorry to hear about this, especially since you lost so much work in the form of coloring and such.

    I guess the silver lining would be that you at least didn’t lose the original pencil and ink drawings, so it’s not like those comics are gone forever. Still, I can only imagine how frustrating this all is.

    Best of luck, and I’ll keep and eye out for the laptop.

  12. Very sorry to hear that!
    (I too am mostly to lazy for proper backups, and I’d die if my PC was ever stolen or the HDD crashed… )

  13. Yeah: I visited a handful of pawn shops to let them know that if they stumbled on it, I’d buy it no questions asked. But some of them said I shouldn’t talk to them, because if they recognize something as stolen, they are legally not permitted to buy it. Instead, they send a list to the police of stuff they take in, and it’s matched against the stolen items database. But others seemed nice and said they’d keep an eye out.

    Tanya: Actually, the laptop was the one machine in the place running XP, so as to have native Photoshop (and handle Quicken and things, but that was a new addition so I didn’t lose much.) Also, games.

    Jess Allen, Kimberly: Thank you! I think I can handle it myself, thanks to all the orders for the new t-shirts :)

    Myself: Man, that story could’ve ended so painfully. One of the saddest stories I’ve ever heard had to do with a guy who was being fired and didn’t know it, and his data was deleted early by accident, and he spent the whole week mourning the lost data and then working diligently to reconstruct his last two years’ work, when everyone in the room knew that he was about to be fired and the data would be deleted again. It’s up there with Fry’s dog in the category of “stuff that I have to avoid thinking about for too long.”

    tiuk: Yeah, although what gets posted often doesn’t look a lot like what was on paper — I can never recreate things exactly. I do a lot of alteration on the computer, redoing letters, adding lines, adjusting things. For such simple comics I can be pretty picky about details :) But yes, nothing too much is lost.

  14. Man that sucks :( I don’t suppose you’re making enough money on the T-shirts to be able to just go out and buy a new tablet PC without really worrying about the cost? *buys some more or something* :P

  15. I feel your pain, and sympathise, and feel duty bound to tell you that what you did (and failed to do) is dumb. If you recognise that you’re too busy to do manual backup steps, you must automate them. My wife has a “My Documents” folder on her laptop, which is automatically synchronised to a RAID-array in a server in the house, whenever the laptop connects via wireless. The crucial parts of the RAID-array is backed up every night onto another disk. The baby photos were last night archived onto a DVD, which will be sent to offsite secure fireproof storage.

    Sorry again, but maybe you can learn this lesson (the hard way) and never suffer again.

    Mike

  19. Aw man that sucks! I’ve never had anything stolen like that but if I lost my computer I would have a case of the rages and also the lost datas. Instead I will have a case of the rages for you, by proxy! I hope – it helps, a little?

  20. Really sorry to hear about this, xkcd – and angry on your behalf!

    I don’t know whether this will help, but I have every single one of your cartoons on my hard disk. Of course they aren’t the full resolution, just the best I could download from the site, but I’m sure that every single one is there (I began when your PI cartoon appeared on BoingBoing, and downloaded all the ones that were on your site at that time, then I set up an RSS feed once it was available). Assuming you can see my email from this post, drop me a line if that’s any help.

  21. Dude, just be glad the guy didn’t kick you in the nuts or shoot you or take a crap on your couch or something.

    On the plus side, this is a good excuse for me to convince my wife that it’s OK for me to buy more tee-shirts because it’s “for a cause”.

    Also, pissing in your face would’ve been pretty traumatic. Man.

  22. Man, “sucks” is about the only worked that sums it up. I don’t know what I’d do without my lappy. I have a spare 6 year old HP that just needs a little work if you want it. I mean, not that it’s good for anything besides looking like a laptop, but for the sake of xkcd, it’s all yours.
    I hope that the desperate thief doesn’t slow you down, tho, for real.

  25. It’s probably a really good thing you didn’t wake up while they were there. I was robbed twice when living in a particularly bad area in Brooklyn. The first time, i was cleaned out while I was away. The second time, I walked in just as they had broken through my bedroom window and I consider myself lucky to typing this right now, alive and not breathing through an iron lung.

    Good luck with getting your laptop back, but my experience with the police is that for robberies, where no one sees the thief, they just file a report and that’s that. It’s gone and has likely already been sold to a shady electronics store, wiped and reloaded with Windows.

    Anyway, I’m sorry to hear this. I know how it feels.

  26. 1) You overlooked the possibilty that the raptor staged the whole thing. it is robo after all. (suggestion… robo-cop?)

    2) Well, you’ve roused the ire of geeks all over the world. I’m sure if you happened to post that hardware address, someone somewhere could find it..? also, call a local college IT dept and talk to people there.. lots of schools register hardware addresses and provide all sorts of cool registration services to easily manipulated information systems students (bribe them with coffee and old kraftwerk cds).

    3) Also, you’d be surprised. Stuff does turn up a lot. Just make sure the police have accurate contact info for you.

  29. Dude, sorry for your loss.. but im thinking the same as RB, have you checked the apartment and its surroundings for velociraptor foot prints? maybe its time to set up grape juice traps… theyre on to you..

    im happy we dont have those creatures here in snowy sweden. (though we have polar bears, and theyre scary also ;-) )

  30. Damn, sorry to hear about that :/

    Anyway, for the future, if you’re too lazy for full-blown backup (I can’t blame you, I am) you should think about setting up a secure SVN repository or something, where you’d store all your documents, everything you do (you can get your sysadmin do that on the xkcd machine can’t you?).

    That way :

    1. Your sysadmin can backup the repository, you don’t have to handle it yourself, he probably knows how to handle that kind of stuff and where and how to store the backups.
    2. If you happen to get a machine stolen again, or if you destroy one, or if it fails, or anything else, at least your important stuff will be safely stored in a place where you can retrieve it from anywhere on earth (as long as you have a web connection).

    SVN…

    is good.

  31. +1 to setting up an account for “a new laptop” fund.

    We will all be sad if a MWF happens and there’s no xkcd comic. Please don’t make us sad.

  33. A few years back my house was broken into in the scant 20 minutes I had left the house. The result? The dirty thief took everything (DVDs, money, PlayStation’s and other gaming consoles, bikes, etc.) and left a huge mess.

    Everything except for one thing thing that is.

    My giant c.d. book? Opened up, flipped through and tossed on the floor. It seems my music taste isn’t worth a quick buck or two.

    Anyhow,
    I am a long time reader and stalker of all things xkcd but never a commenter of any sort. Hope everything works out well for you.

  35. I second that vote for SVN. I’m a heavy user of SVN and it’s saved my ass more times that I can count with rational numbers.

    It’s a tragety that your laptop got stolen, but the fact that the thief was in the room with while you slept is more frightening. Everything material is easily replaceable, your life is not.

    I hope they find your laptop and I hope the contents are intact.

    Best of luck!

  37. Can you handle more t-shirt orders right now? If so, I’ll probably be ordering 1 for me and 1 for my wife. We can tell *each other* it’s for a good cause.

  38. All of you people requesting a PayPal link to donate to… XKCD has already said no, so why not just buy a few shirts? Its donation with the happy bonus of getting a shirt!

  39. paypal++

    Glad you’re alive. Sorry to hear about your loss.

    I think, should any xkcd readers find this guy, he ought to be more scared of us than he should be of raptors…

  42. That sux, Hope they catch the freak, and hope you buy a dog soon. Crooks hate cute and furry, growling things.

  43. xkcd doesn’t make comics about him(her?)self (I mean, you didn’t really eat beads like a Turing machine, right? Right??) and please could everybody who offered money buy a t-shirt or donate it to Wikipedia or the EFF. :)

    xkcd, thank you for keeping your comic ad-free. I love you. ;-)

  45. PayPal > Shirts

    The point is that sometimes we simply want to help out without the idea of being a consumer. Does every action I take need to relate back to a free market economy? It is hard to feel giving when I get swag out of the deal.

    If a PayPal donation area was created I can feel that I helped XKCD in my own little way…and that means more than any damn t-shirt.

  48. You should make a comic about the incident and then sell T-Shirts with the comic on it to raise funds.

    Maybe RegEx man could save the day?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>