…I left my combat boots in San Francisco. Seriously, when I was out in Sunnyvale for work for the week.

To clarify, my job shipped me out to the Bay area for a week, and a couple of long weekends. A couple coworkers of mine are spending their time off camping & climbing, I decided to hit San Francisco and stay with Christian Perry of SF Beta and Room Full of People fame. I’ve had a fun time cavorting in the SF social scene, and met some very interesting movers and shakers in the web world. In a twist of irony, I spent my week working down in Sunnyvale in an industry older than a PDP-11. Hardly what is to be expected in the Web 2.0 Mecca.

I suppose I haven’t’ clarified exactly what I do, so I’ll go ahead and run it down; since it’s a lot of fun to talk about and I’d like people to know. For the past couple months, I’ve been working for a startup backup software company called Zmanda. We’re currently a leader in open source backup technology, and a fair portion of our engineers work solely on open source software; myself included. I am heading up an effort to analyze & improve BackupPC, and potentially integrate it with our other offerings. This has led me to some really nitty-gritty systems level concerns, which are always fun to deal with; along with a unusually clever storage engine.

However, I’m talking about San Francisco, primarily. I had a great time. A bloody awesome time. The city always seems to have something to do and I am there to enjoy it. The people are awesome and welcoming, and I got to go see a lot of what the city has to offer. My first weekend I spent clubbing and spent time with my cousin Will, who took me out to see a few bands and then off to a bar with a Depeche Mode cover band. Some people may call that heresy, but it was a lot of fun.

The next weekend I got to hang out with a bunch of college friends, and got to see such wonders like an Absinthe bar, complete with lit ice cubes and pixies fluttering about. I also got to reconnect with a bunch of other alums that I hadn’t met before, but were second-degree friends.

Either way, it’s a really rough decision on whether to stay in Chicago, or go out to the Bay area. We’ll see what happens in the next few weeks.