Victim of burglary

I have to inform you of this sad tale that happened to me on thursday 
afternoon. While I was at work, my girlfriend discovered that our 
appartement was broken into.

The burglars took my laptop (Thinkpad T43), my girlfriends laptop 
(Thinkpad T30, my backup laptop) and a 3rd laptop (Thinkpad T23) that was 
being prepared for a family-member as well as other valuables. Since I 
recently switched jobs, these laptops were recently bought and considered 
an investement for the next 2 to 3 years.

Besides the financial loss, one of the laptops contained most of my 
professional 'historical' memory (like my photo archive, instant messaging 
logs, and more personal and professional material that is invaluable to 
others).

Luckily they left alone my buildsystem (probably too heavy and risky) and 
my CDs, DVDs and books alone (time consuming and risky). So I can recover 
an old backup, but I lost almost 10 months of important data, and 10 years 
of less important, but personal information.

For this reason I changed my wishlist (and webpage) slightly and added a 
Paypal donation button. It would be naive to hope my gear will be 
returned somehow (although I have been distributing flyers around the 
neighboorhood asap and been looking for serial numbers and unique 
characteristics so that my stuff can be identified in case we have 
witnesses in this or other burglary cases).

If people were planning to thank me by buying something from my wishlist, 
this would be a good time. And please consider donating via Paypal instead 
(or shopping/visiting my Google adsense sponsors).

	http://dag.wieers.com/personal/wishlist.php

Thanks in advance and sorry for the bad news. I personally hate to bother 
you about this, but I feel I have little choice :-(

By the way, if you have a 'cilinder' lock in your door (not sure if this 
is what it is called in English, but I'll post some pictures), think twice 
about changing it or secure the lock with additional metal armor. Because 
those locks can be broken off in less than 10 seconds with fairly simple
equipment without disturbing the environment.

And do make regular backups and store them on offsite locations (!), even
when you feel safe or you think the effort it not worth the trouble.

PS For those people that have me listed in skype, please check your logs 
and monitor skype for my presence since thursday 2 februari 15:23, that's 
when I logged off. That's currently my only hope for recovery.

--   dag wieers,  [email protected],  http://dag.wieers.com/   --
[all I want is a warm bed and a kind word and unlimited power]