Over on BoingBoing, I said that it's less a general-audience call for help-- "Here is a worthy cause everyone should know about!"-- than the community of SFF writers spreading the word to more writers and writer-supporters-- "Here is a sucky thing that happened to people in our community-- let's help them out, because that's what community does!"

I've been liking people a lot lately. This helps.

Posted July 6, 2008 12:50 PM by Diatryma

Responses like this (rallying round to help) renew some belief in the goodness of humans.

Responses like the first comment on the BoingBoing piece make me despair - as indicated in "Got it in one", it does seen that some people just cannot comment on anything Cory Doctorow posts without finding something negative to say about it.

Posted July 6, 2008 4:38 PM by dcb

One thing I do is email work to myself, so it's sitting at Google.

There's probably other tricks.

The idea of the U3 drive seems to have vanished, Nobody wants to chance random strangers autorunning software on a USB drive. But that way you do get a pocketable software+data package.

Posted July 6, 2008 5:29 PM by Dave Bell

I'm glad they've replaced the laptops so quickly. Now, I hope that they didn't lose too much work and what they did lose they can recreate as quickly or quicker.

Posted July 6, 2008 5:43 PM by John Chu

dcb (2), you're right. Some of the comments at Boing Boing were pointless and gratuitously nasty.

Note use of past tense. Thank you for pointing them out.

Posted July 6, 2008 7:12 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

The response in the blogosphere has been amazingly fast and extraordinarily generous. Much thanks to everyone who spread the word, sent a donation, or had good intentions but were aced out by the lightning response. As I write this, the students are replacing their stolen laptops.

Thanks, everyone!

Eileen Gunn
Vice-Chair
Clarion West

Posted July 6, 2008 7:57 PM by Eileen Gunn

Patrick, that's one of the beauties of the internet - it is very good about routing around delays and problems. And not just at the packet level. Social node PatrickNielsenHayden was unavailable to service the request for help, but social node BoingBoing was chugging right along, and handled the request.

Posted July 6, 2008 8:04 PM by John Houghton

Teresa,

And I realise that what came later was even worse! I'm glad I don't have your job.

But the kitties video you linked to was fun!

Posted July 7, 2008 3:22 PM by dcb

Nasty knock for the students that must've been. Glad it's fixed, so far as equipment goes, and hope the interruption doesn't throw them too badly.

Posted July 7, 2008 5:43 PM by pericat

Thank you so much for your support, Teresa and Patrick. Everyone here in the Clarion West class of 08 appreciated it profoundly. =)

Posted August 12, 2008 8:27 PM by Christopher Reynaga