Saturday, November 22, 2008

The Tale of the Prodigal Laptop

Remember when Betsy had her laptop stolen from her locked office at the University a year ago? Well the police recently found the laptop during a raid on an unrelated matter. The woman in possession of it claimed she bought it "on the street"--but the police were justifiably suspicious. Sure enough, the serial numbers matched. It seems the new owner did erase Betsy's personal info, but the applications are all still there. We are going to ask an uber-techy friend (hi, Justin) to see if he can recover any of the erased files. I think the odds are good that he may be able to recover some of the files--but how many is a mystery.

In the meantime, Betsy and I did amuse ourselves looking at the pictures left on the laptop by the woman the police confiscated it from. They didn't want to delete anything for fear of deleting Betsy's stuff, so we now have an interesting portrait of this person's life. We even have some of the lurid details. I'll leave that to your imaginations.

Believe it or not, my very Christian wife thinks we should burn all those pictures onto DVD and send them to her. Perhaps that is the charitable thing to do, but I call baloney on this woman's claim that she bought the laptop from "some guy on the street" and has no idea who he was, etc. More likely she knows exactly who this guy is and she may be willing to fess up when she's facing a charge of possession of stolen goods. I also suspect that this woman was the one that deleted Betsy's data, which is the real loss in all this.

As I was explaining the difference between Civil and Criminal proceedings to Betsy she asked, "Is it worth it?" and I replied, "It depends how angry you are!"

Ok, I'll start letting it go. Hey, we thought it was gone-gone, so that's something.

-t

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