Lost laptop

Written by Michael

I took the train in Austria (my home country) on Friday. I had to change trains once. Once I had made myself comfortable on the second train, I wanted to open my laptop to resume working.

Except I no longer had my laptop on me.

I had carried it in my hand to change trains. It slowly dawned on me that I must have misplaced it somehow. Stress.

I spoke with the conductor of my current train. He was kind enough to call the conductor of the other train I'd been on. Unfortunately, he said that the laptop wasn't there.

So I got off at the next stop an hour later to make my way back to the station where I had changed trains. One train going in the right direction was just leaving. I ran to catch it but missed it by 30 seconds.

I took the next train back. On the way, I tried to recollect where I'd last had the laptop. I had gone to a shop to buy a drink, but couldn't remember whether I'd still had the laptop there.

The manager of the shop was very friendly. He looked at the footage from the security camera and was able to see that I hadn't had the laptop on me when I entered the shop. Since I had gone to the shop straight after getting off the first train, that most likely meant that I had simply left the laptop on the first train. The fact that its conductor couldn't find it means (I think) that someone simply saw the unattended laptop, a nice MacBook Pro worth $1,500, and took it.

Now, after the weekend I was able to call lost and found. They again said that nobody had turned the laptop in. By now I think the chances I'll ever see it again are pretty much 0.

The good thing is that I have backups of everything. I won't have lost any data. But the thought that someone else has my data now (my Chrome sessions etc.) is pretty horrifying. I have to change all my passwords etc.

I'm working on borrowed a Microsoft Surface Pro in the meantime (thanks, Mum). It's actually a pretty decent machine with a nice screen. But its 4 GB of RAM are way too little to operate virtual machines, which are required for developing fman across OSs. So I ordered a new machine.

I looked at getting another MacBook, but the prices are just ridiculous. So, since I'd always wanted to try Linux as my main OS anyways, I've now ordered a Dell XPS 13". It's hailed as one of the (if not the) best Linux laptops. It's quite cool actually, because the laptop I lost was my first Mac. One of the reasons I switched from Windows was that I wanted to see what other OSs are like. Now I have a chance to learn about the OS that's still missing from my collection: Linux.

I have not decided on a Linux distribution yet. The XPS 13 comes pre-installed with Ubuntu but I may be looking for something more minimalistic. We will see.

If you have a laptop, I highly recommend you encrypt its local disk. I never thought this necessary, but now I know it is. Obviously, you also want to have regular backups of everything.

For fman, this is more an annoyance than the end of the world. Thank god I have good backups. It will take a few days until I'm fully up to speed again. But I promise I'll be back with a vengeance!

(It's funny actually - Due to my Austrian accent my friend in the UK always wanted me to say the classic Schwarzenegger line "I'll be back". Well, there you have it.)