A Storm, a Douchebag and Stolen Computers

Last night we tried to sleep through the loudest and most tumultuous thunderstorm I’ve seen in my adult life. The lightning flashes were so frequent, it was like Britney Spears getting out of a limo. And I saw it rain on Gozo for the first time since we arrived. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed precipitation.

While I slept, another kind of storm–a raging meme–swept across the Intarweb. I read it first on James’s blog, then saw it on MetaFilter, Boing Boing, Fark (where’s the Photoshop contest?) and later, in the Globe and Mail (thanks, Roland). You’ve probably heard or read about it by now, so here it is in brief. Two young thieves broke into Workspace, that most excellent Vancouver co-working centre. They stole a schwack of computers. I’ll let my friend and yours, Workspace owner Bill MacEwen take over from there:

They took with them four laptops and our two iMac’s. We have the crime on tape, but weren’t able to capture a high res. image. Amazingly, one of the thieves (or at least the new owner of our hot machines) was using photobooth and unknowingly uploaded a photo of himself to our flickr stream.

And Bill didn’t even have to use that Undercover software. Here’s the mental giant himself:

As some have pointed out, this could possibly be a friend of the thief, or somebody who bought the stolen computer. The likeliest scenario, though, is that this is one of the criminals.

Can You Clean That Up a Little?

Bill also posted some video of the thieves, as well as stills captured from that video. I tried to do that thing I often mock in crime dramas–magical photo enhancement to get a better look at their faces. My results weren’t quite as good as CSI: Miami (click for larger versions):

The second guy could be the tattoo’d fellow, but it’s far from definitive. Thieves of the future beware–the computers are getting smarter than the people stealing them.

UPDATE: It turns out that this fellow isn’t the thief–he turned himself in to Victoria police yesterday. He’s still a douchebag for buying a stolen computer.