Tonight, Mystery Guest and I flew down to San Francisco for a quick weekend away (and to visit some friends). We arrived late and raced to get to a dinner with Laura Lippay in the financial district. Sadly, between our arrival time around 10pm to when we got back to the rental car at 11:30pm, the car was broken into (jimmied the driver's side lock and popped the trunk). My laptop, all our luggage and lots of Mystery Guest's clothing (and my trademark yellow shoes) were stolen.

So, here I am at Laura's apartment (you rock, Laura!), posting and hoping that someone might know the underbelly of San Francisco well enough to help me recover my laptop. I had a very important presentation (that wasn't backed up) that I had created for Monday (40+ slides). Our other items are replacable, but I'm very concerned that I may not have enough time between now and Monday to re-build that presentation.

So, if you're a savvy Bay Area resident and have any idea of what I can do to recover the laptop, I'd greatly appreciate your help.

p.s. Luckily, I'm under Diner's Club card insurance, so I believe I can get back much of the monies for the lost property. I keep calling their 800 number, but all it says is "all circuits busy." Hopefully I'll reach them soon. Update - nope, Diner's won't cover anything :(

p.p.s. SF is super wired - the police department had me file the police report online (apparently they don't send out cops to broken-in cars).

p.p.p.s. Laura - you rock. Seriously.

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who was so kind to us. For those who are interested, here are more specifics.

As I noted, the SF Police didn't come out for the call, apparently there are quite a few crimes like this each night (even in the very safe parts of SF). The good news is that it does happen overwhelmingly to rental cars - so as long as you own your car (or just be careful when renting), you're much more safe. Apparently, the little "e" (for Enterprise) on the back bumper is a dead giveaway for a theft.

We're going to get some money back - hopefully about $1500 (from business insurance) to replace at least the laptop and the camera. The clothes - including one of my two pairs of yellow Pumas and lots of Mystery Guests's favorite clothes (because you always bring your nicest stuff on vacation, right?) will be the big financial loss, but we have plenty more clothes at home, so no forced nudity.

We flew back to Seattle on Saturday midday - after a very nice Dim Sum breakfast with Brad Stone (who wrote about SEOmoz a couple years back in Newsweek) and his wife, Jennifer (no reason to mope when you can keep appointments and see friends instead). Included in the missing luggage were keys to our apartment and our office - both of which were re-keyed yesterday afternoon. Tomorrow early morning (6am), I'll be flying back to San Francisco to complete my presentation, and today is spent at home on my desktop, re-building it.

We've had no luck with Craigslist, yet, but even if the machine does appear there (or any other items), it will be likely that they've already been re-sold once or twice, so tracing all the possessions back together is tough. Overall, the worst loss is certainly the vacation time with friends and each other for Mystery Guest and me. I'll be leaving for China in a couple weeks, and Mystery Guest has been having a very hard time at work, so this was supposed to be a great way to share some relaxing, fun time together - maybe next trip.

Sorry to briefly turn this into a personal blog - hopefully our experience will help all those other search-industry-world-travelers to be a little more careful in the future.