Home studio security

  But then I'm nearly always home. If I'm not then my two large
barking (and potentially biting) burglar alarms are.              

This remark triggered a recollection that might serve as a cautionary
tale.

My studio is also at home, in the garage, and I don’t broadcast it,
fortunately. About 6 years ago, on a hot summer night , we left the
back door of the house open for air. All six of us were in the house
(small, unpretentious bungalow in Chicago suburb), and my oldest
daughter and I were to catch a plane to go look at a college very
early in the a.m. I got up at 5:00. My husband, who often works late
at night (freelance writer), went to bed at 2:30. Lights were left
on, and we have a medium size dog.

When I got up, my purse–with $400 cash and our airplane
tickets–was gone from the dining table. A man (later caught) had
walked right in, taken it, and walked out. The dog slept right
through it, perhaps because she’s used to footsteps at all hours, or
because he didn’t sound furtive, though she’s generally very
vigilant. Needless to say, we missed our flight, and lost all my
money and credit cards,etc.

–Noel

  This remark triggered a recollection that might serve as a
cautionary tale. 

One more tale.

Two years ago, just before Tucson, an Opal dealer friend of mine
from Australia was spending the night with one of his friends in
Phoenix before going to the show. Well in the middle of the night,
he heard something and ask his friend if it was him. The response
was “yes , i’ts OK, go back to sleep”. The next morning, he and
his friend found the projection TV setting in the drive way, his
friend’s hand gun missing from the dresser, and over 100K of opal
jewelry collected for the Tucson show missing.

They caught the bozos later, but didn’t recover all of the jewelry.
What they did recover was the pieces that the bozos bent and broke
and decided that it was “fake because it broke” and tossed into a
dumpster. They still ended up loosing over 80K worth of jewelry.

This wasn’t a targeted break in, but the lesson is the same. Keep
it really locked down, and keep it really hid. You never know who
is going to show up in the middle of the night.

Don