RonAmok!

Social Media for Executives
Oct 26, 2007

I’m a Content Creator

At 5:00 p.m. yesterday, my plane touched down at Logan International Airport in Boston. The flights from Orange County were great. I finished The Wisdom of Crowds and started tearing into Wikinomics. I added pages and pages of notes to my two year old notebook, the one which I use for capuring ideas.

After de-planing (don’t you love that word?) I got my Hertz Rental and proceded to drive through Game#2 World Series traffic to meet John Wall. We had a nice dinner and then stopped by Blogtoberfest located downstairs at a pub called :”The Pour.”

At about 9:30, we returned to the parking garage to reteive our cars. John’s was fine. My rental on the other hand had a shattered window. And my bag was gone. In it were:

  • My company issued laptop.
  • Video iPod
  • iPod Touch
  • Palm Pilot
  • Casio Exilim camera (with great video of our landing in Boston)
  • Reading glasses (I’ve had ‘em for 20 years)
  • The Wisdom of Crowds
  • Wikinomics
  • Pens
  • And my two years of notes in Social Media!

Welcome home to Boston, Ron!

Well, last night I mourned my loss. My wife helped me look at the situation relatively…the fact that some folks had just lost their entire homes to fire…and I had just lost a bag.

And as she usually is, she was right.

This morning I got up at 5:30 a.m. and drove the rental car back to Boston. During my dark drive in, I had a chance to think. For some reason I started prioritizing the things that had been stolen — and came to a fascinaing conclusion.

The computer and the camera were the highest on my list. And the reason why was even more amazing. A realization: I am a content creator. That’s what I’m driven to do. I came to PodCamp Boston to speak with people, to learn, and to bring those insights to you via this blog. Without my tools, I was dead in the water.

Another call to my wonderful wife and she encouraged me to replace those items, explaining: “Ron, that’s what you do.”

This morning I replaced my bag, picked up a new laptop, and replaced my little Casio digital camera. The other stuff I can replace over time. But my content creation stuff, well that’s a different story.

Hopefully I’ll be bringing better news from the confernece. Stay tuned!

Tags:

Filed under: Content Development
« New Media and The Cash Cab
Podcamp Boston Day #1 »

  • I am so sorry. I am Bostonian and I hate to hear this kind of thing. It stinks.
  • Man! I'm so sorry Ron. All I can say is "thats just not fair." It is really too bad that that sort of thing happens. You hope that since it is a parking garage it is somehow safer, rental cops or something. Verizon always tells us to store our laptops in the trunk, as a last resort. They actually recommend taking them with us everywhere! We even have to lock them down to our desk if we leave them in the office! The office that has cameras everywhere and keycard only access. Sorry you got the bums rush. Hope you had some backups.
  • JTM
    The gadgety things are replaceable, but the NOTEBOOK will be hard to replace, unless you have a backup of THAT somewhere (i.e. old media photo copies.) I've found that photo copies (or newer media scans) come in handy as "back-ups" for hand written notes and drawings that I can no longer find the originals of. Maybe you should (in the future) make such back-ups!
    What's SAD is all BUT the replaceable stuff is probably in a dumpster somewhere!
  • Ron
    Thanks, Nish.

    Yeah, it has been tough. But I'm getting over it.

    And as for a backup hard-drive, a good backup strategy is always a good thing. I've lost data before, which is why I'm paranoid about it. I can hoestly say, that there is very little data that was lost.

    Ron
  • Mr. Ron: That is a tough loss! My sympathies. If that had happened to me, my first thought would have been "It's all over" and then I'll go back to buying everything all over again and will definitely feel better. This incident is another reminder that I should go buy an external back up drive ASAP.
blog comments powered by Disqus