I’ve been looking for a job in San Francisco very hard for the last couple months since I got up here. I’ve had nibbles, I’ve had bites.

And then, I had the events of the last week.

A few weeks ago, I’d applied for what sounded like a really ideal job at The Nerdery, a great, developer-driven, Minnesota-based company that’s aggressively expanding its Chicago office. Their website did an excellent job of making it sound like an absolutely ideal place to work. I had a first interview that I thought went very well, and I turned in a code sample I was pretty happy with.

I hadn’t heard from them before I left for Chicago, so I was a little disappointed, because the idea of moving back to Chicago to take such a great job had just seemed so perfect. I hadn’t realized how badly I wanted to move back until I was presented with the realistic possibility of doing so.

And then, after I dropped a check-in email to HR on Sunday, the chaos began.

I had my second interview with the Nerdery Monday morning, and loved it. They told me everything I wanted to hear, including that this page of raves from their employees was, in the experience of my interviewers, true. I left very, very excited about that prospect.

Apparently, that excitement set off some sort of alarm that only HR people can hear, because by the time Tuesday afternoon rolled around, I had booked three interviews with SF companies, had two, gotten a second rounder with one of those two and pulled a code sample out of my ass for that one, too.

Between the interviews, conversations with friends and family, and assorted negotiations I’ve done over the last few days (and maybe some yelling at the terrible Northwestern secondary Saturday night), my voice is completely shot. I slept about 10 hours out of 72.

Then the Nerdery’s offer hit my inbox.

I am very happy to announce that this morning I accepted a position as an Interactive Developer with the Nerdery’s Chicago office. I’ll be starting the week after Thanksgiving (when I’ll have to do a week of orientation at HQ in Minnesota).

I’ll be sad to leave San Francisco – This town has been exceptionally good to me in my short time here, and I’ve very much enjoyed my time in the city. I’m so glad I moved up here, even if it was for a short time, because it accelerated my learning in a way that I don’t believe would have been possible if I’d stayed in LA.

Moving up here absolutely put me in the mind frame and gave me the impetus to bring up my skill set far and fast enough that I was able to get this job, and for that, I can never thank San Francisco enough.

But Chicago is home. I may have grown up in DC, but I have never felt as home anywhere as I have in Chicago. The fact that I am jumping for joy to move there in the goddamn dead of winter after 8 years in California probably says something about how much I missed the place.

[By the way, Chicago folk: I will preemptively warn you that I will be whining about the cold this year. Next year, I'll have my tolerance for the cold back and I'll shut the fuck up, but please, spot me a winter.]

The logistics of all this are kind of nuts. The current plan is to leave SF on November 12, with my car towing a trailer full of my crap minus about 90% of my furniture, and my dad (who VERY generously offered to help with the driving so long as I didn’t make him miss his 75th birthday party, a concession I thought was entirely fair) and Chaplin keeping me company in the car.

We’re shooting to arrive in Chicago on November 16th, though that will change if the weather gets bad along the drive. Trying to find an apartment is already in motion — god, rent in Chicago is so delightfully cheap — and hopefully I’ll have that squared away before I show up.

I am exhausted. I am emotionally wrung out after the rollercoaster I’ve been on for the last week or so. I have so much insanity ahead of me.

But I am so, so happy about this job and this move.

I can’t just post a video for Via Chicago, because that would be way too easy. So instead, a fond audio farewell to California with an enjoyably random video.

Screeners? Yes, this year I was actually able to get hold of a few early versions of pilots for NBC and CBS, so I’ll indicate which pilots I saw that way. I’ll also note when I saw them, since the earlier I saw them, the greater the chances that there have been significant changes made since I saw them. I’ll also note which shows I’ve been watching since they premiered.

Anything with an asterisk is something I would recommend based on whatever version of the pilot I saw. I’ll probably be watching a couple more shows than that, but those are the ones that really stood out. Anything not listed here, I haven’t actually watched and thus do not feel qualified to give an opinion on other than “that looked stupid enough that even I wouldn’t watch it.”

After the jump, the full list.

Let’s start with all the stuff I saw on screeners:

NBC

Comedy

*Up All Night (saw on screener in late May, have been watching) – Definitely the best of NBC’s comedy batch. Christina Applegate and Will Arnett are great as harried new parents, and it strikes just the right balance between humor and sentimentality. The change to a talk show instead of a PR agency for the work environment and making Maya Rudolph’s character about 20-30% less cartoonish were both improvements on the original pilot, but they’re still trying to figure out just the right balance of work stuff vs. home stuff. Very, very promising.

Whitney (saw on screener, late May, did not watch final version) – I got through eight minutes of this, had a technical issue, and decided it was not worth watching the rest. Punishingly awful laugh track, and what I did see seemed to be trying to do for casual sexism what Outsourced did for casual racism. There’s talent behind this, so maybe they can find a way to rework it to be less atrocious, but I suspect they may need to do so by just doing a different show.

Free Agents (saw on screener, late May, did not watch final version) – Yet another will-they-or-won’t they workplace sitcom, with the twist that he’s just gotten divorced and she’s getting over the death of her fiance. Anthony Stewart Head is clearly having fun reprising his role as the asshole boss of a PR company from the British original, but Hank Azaria just comes off as bland and kind of whiny. Again – good talent behind this (lots of folks from Party Down, and there’s a great shout-out to one of that show’s best episodes), but the whole thing was pretty blah considering the pedigree.

Bent (Airing midesason; saw on screener, late May, may watch if reviews indicate it’s improved) – This was moderately charming, if suffering from a serious case of exposition-itis. Characters who don’t know each other spitting out background information about their conversation partner they really couldn’t possibly know, just to communicate this info to the audience. The cast seemed to gel pretty nicely, though, so this is one where some carefully considered changes could make this a lot better.

Drama

Prime Suspect (saw on screener, late May, have been watching) – Shot a little more in a Law & Order style than I would have expected, but I like Maria Bello in this. I’ve never seen the British original, but it seems some of its vintage sexism made it into the pilot – though allegedly that’s changing in the series as it moves on (I haven’t watched last night’s episode yet). Replacing the husband character in the final version did wonders – the original guy was terrible. Seems pretty good as a cop show, but some of the attempts at making Bello a bad-ass were a little over the top (what cop slaps her gun THEN her badge up against the back window of a cab?).

The Playboy Club (saw on screener, early June, have not watched) – It’s the Eddie Cibrian show! Seriously, for a show about Playboy Bunnies, this show puts an awful lot of weight on the buff shoulders of Cibrian. I’ve got some residual affection for him since he’s very funny in one of my favorite movies, but he is just not a good enough actor to carry this show. I’ve heard this actually got substantially worse since the original pilot, which is saying something, because the original pilot was pretty blah. Also, the fact that the producers here were so lazy that they decided for their black Bunny they should cast the black Bunny from Mad Men speaks volumes about exactly how much thought goes into this show.

Grimm (saw on screener, early June, will not watch) – I’ll qualify this by noting that this sort of fantasy isn’t really my genre, and I will say that the effects were pretty impressive for having been whipped together on a pilot timeline. However, I wasn’t terribly impressed. The lead is likeable enough, but the whole thing just comes off as super-silly to me. Silas Weir Mitchell is a really undervalued actor, but his character here comes off just a shade too far on the wacky side to be effective. The music, which will hopefully be improved for the final version, was massively overbearing and drove into the ground why I don’t like this sort of thing most of the time.

CBS

Comedy

Two Broke Girls (saw on screener, late May, have been watching) – Look, I really like Kat Dennings, I think she’s damn funny. But she can’t save this on her own. CBS doesn’t do shows without a laugh track, and while they’re better at gauging what level of canned laughter is acceptable than most of the other networks, it doesn’t mean it’s not still awfully grating. The pilot was tweaked until it seemed considerably funnier than the first version I saw, but the second episode was a serious dud, and I think I may need to check back in when this has found more of its voice.

How To Be A Gentleman (saw on screener, late May, did not watch final version) – Probably the least offensive of fall the shows trying to re-embrace hypermasculinity, since at least this one says men have neutered themselves rather than saying they’ve allowed their women to castrate them. There’s a really great cast here (Rickety Cricket from It’s Always Sunny…, Mary-Lynn Rajskub, the manager from Flight of the Conchords, and, uh, Kevin Dillon), but I have a feeling you could turn the camera on their conversations between takes and have a much funnier show than the mediocre comedy this actually winds up being.

Drama

*Person of Interest (saw on screener, late May, have been watching) – My favorite description of this is “Jesus and Ben Linus solving crimes.” Jim Cavaziel and Michael Emerson are both playing variations on characters they’ve played before, but the marriage of the JJ Abrams Bizarro Technological Mystery style and the CBS House Brand Criminal Procedural style works significantly better than I would have thought. There’s a lot of babble to justify the fairly strange premise of the show, but it’s well-written babble. This is one I’m going to keep an eye on.

Unforgettable (saw on screener, late May, did not watch final version) – CBS basically takes a really fascinating 60 Minutes story (and you should really watch the video at that link, it’s one of the better pieces they’ve done in years) and turns it into…a criminal procedural! What a surprise! Poppy Montgomery is okay in the lead role, but the mechanism they use to show her perfect memory is a little cheesy. It’s also clear that the memory part was much more important than the cop part to the writer, since the cop part is pretty stupidly plotted. Will definitely appeal to CBS’s core audience, but I wasn’t sufficiently impressed to add it to my rotation.

A Gifted Man (saw on screener, late may, did not watch final version) – Desperate attempt to marry a medical procedural and The Ghost Whisperer. I couldn’t stand this, and I actually laughed out loud when the main character, who is a neurosurgeon, decides to address the hallucinations he’s having by…Googling “hallucinations.” I mean, really, people, please tell me that did not make it into the final version. The saddest part of all this is that it utterly wastes Margo Martindale as the main character’s long-suffering assistant, when she proved she was capable of SO much more in this last season of Justified.

The following shows I have watched as they’ve premiered. I didn’t see earlier versions of any of them.

FOX

Comedy

*New Girl – Basically, this show is a referendum on how you feel about Zooey Deschanel. I think she’s delightful, so I really enjoy this show. If you don’t, you will hate it with the fire of a thousand suns. It’s pretty cartoonish and a little twee, but she’s just so damn likeable that I can put up with a lot of goofiness I’d otherwise find over the top. One unfortunate thing is that Damon Wayans Jr.’s other show (Happy Endings) unexpectedly got picked up, and he made a far better impression in the pilot than the guy they got to replace him going forward. Hopefully that character will get rounded out as the season goes on.

Drama

Terra Nova – Dinosaurs! Who doesn’t like dinosaurs? Some of the CGI on this looks pretty pretty great, and some of it still looks half-baked. Which is kind of amazing, considering that this has been in the works for well over a year and a half. The pilot was a little thin on character development and heavy on laying out the plot – there were definitely a couple of ham-fisted HERE IS THE HOOK FOR THE REST OF THE SEASON moments – but I’m going to hang on for at least another episode to see how it does, mostly because I really like Jason O’Mara. Who, full disclosure, was in the pilot of the last series I worked on and was ridiculously nice despite basically not having slept for a week by the time he got to our set for reshoots because he was also starring in a totally different series which shot on the opposite side of the country.

ABC

Comedy

*Suburgatory – Great companion piece for criminally underrated The Middle and powerhouse Modern Family, with a nicely sarcastic bite and well-written characters. The actors also do a great job of quickly locking in on the characters’ personalities, and it just gels immediately. To a certain extent, it’s Desperate Housewives from the point of view of a sane father and daughter that moved to the block, but it’s much, much funnier than that description implies. Definitely one to keep an eye on.

Drama

Pan Am - It’s got style by the barrel, but substance is a little harder to gauge after the pilot episode. There was a lot of work setting up back stories for four stewardesses and a pilot (This pilot/pilot thing is going to drive me nuts). The one storyline that stood out as the most potentially interesting was the one where one of the stews is actually working for the CIA, but the other stories were just a little too thin in one episode to make a judgement about how interesting they’ll be as it goes on. If you want to look at a very pretty recreation of the early Sixties with some hilariously square-jawed men and wee tiny gorgeous women, you’ll definitely enjoy the eye candy.

Whew! And yet I still managed to get an app approved and leave the house repeatedly this week. Amazing!

Finally, I’m looking forward to the following two upcoming shows:

- Showtime’s Homeland, with two actors I really like in Claire Danes and Damian Lewis, and what I’ve heard is a much more interesting take on the War on Terror than the producers’ previous delightful let’s-blow-shit-up-athon, 24. 

-FX’s American Horror Story, which I’ve heard is 32 flavors of bonkers. Wildly divisive among all the TV critics I follow on Twitter, but they all seem to agree that it’s very, very ambitious. And frankly, I’d rather watch an ambitious failure than a boring one.

As an example, here’s a few photos from my walk today, from my apartment to Coit Tower to Pier 39 to Ghiradelli Square (I did break down and take Muni back, though – 5.5 miles plus 432 stairs up to Coit Tower is a LOT). Slideshow below, flickr link for those who hate flash.

Really enjoying things here so far – I feel like I’m moving in the right direction towards gainful employment, and starting to feel a teensy bit less like a tourist. But not enough like I live here to think going to climb Coit Tower is a dumb idea.

Yet.

I’ve mentioned this on Facebook and Twitter, but I thought I’d elaborate a little bit here, since those venues are better for quick takes and updates on the travails of moving and selling all my shit rather than longer explanations. And this is a fairly long explanation.

I moved out to L.A. for one reason: To work in the entertainment industry. I never really had much desire to live in L.A., I have still never learned how to surf, and I wasn’t excited by the prospect of being around the stars.

Originally, I wanted to be a sound engineer. I had the incredibly stupid timing to move out here shortly after all the sound houses hired their fall interns, so I went looking for other stuff that sounded fun.

I came across an internship at this brand new talk show, only on the air six weeks at the time. I came in to talk to the guy doing the hiring, and due to my eagerness to work five days a week for free, I was hired.

I wound up staying there for two years (and am still friends with many, many people I worked with there), and it brought me into the world of Television production, which I enjoyed way more than I ever thought I would. I was always more of a fiddler in college, I never really was in the “Let’s put on a show!” crowd.

But TV handed me all sorts of crazy challenges, ones I really enjoyed. And those challenges grew progressively harder…for a while. I hit a brick wall with my career around the time that SAG was threatening to go on strike in mid-2009, and I was unemployed for 11 months.

During that period, I took a long, hard look at what I was doing with my life. I have always told people if you don’t really, really love making movies or TV, this business is not worth the bullshit it puts you through. And I came to realize, maybe I didn’t really love it so much anymore.

I started tinkering more deeply with computers, something I’d always done as a hobby, and discovered that I still dropped into a K-Hole whenever I coded, and the deeper I got, the more fun it became. I finally broke down and got an iPhone, and I became really intrigued by the possibilities of what it could do.

I did some research into what it would take to become a coder, and realized that the shortest distance between two points would be working in Mobile – the demand was incredibly high, and while there was a fairly steep learning curve, especially with the iPhone, there was a surprisingly large amount you could do before you got into the super-complicated aspects of everything.

I thought, man, maybe I should go back to school and learn how to do that instead.

This was reinforced when my unemployment streak was snapped by two consecutive pilots – one with a ridiculously tiny budget and one with a ridiculously huge budget. The low-budget one was actually kind of a fun challenge, as everyone was really teaming together to work on a project they believed in (which of course did not get picked up).

The high-budget pilot was…a train wreck. The stories from this one are legendary, but suffice to say that I had the exact thought “I would rather be learning calculus than doing this” more than once on that pilot. That’s when I knew I was definitely done. I even turned down a job that would have been six solid months of work because I realized I just needed to get on with my life.

Going back to school (and actually learning calculus) has come with its own challenges, but it’s been really fun. I competed with kids who were half my age and kept up a hell of a lot better than I could have when I was actually their age, because this time I actually gave a shit.

Things seemed to be at least starting to go in the right direction. I got a totally awesome roommate in the bargain when I moved to be closer to the UCLA campus. I got to see what LA was like when you’re not regularly working from 9am to 11pm. I got to have at least a little bit of a life.

But as much as changing careers has been really helpful, I’ve had a nagging feeling that I didn’t change enough. Still being in LA, still having most of my friends working in the entertainment industry…I’ve still felt stuck.

And the things that previously annoyed me about L.A. itself have become like fingernails on a chalkboard now that I’m not distracted by either a) working 14 hour days or b) being so broke I never left the house.

I’ve particularly been irritated by the city’s epic sprawl, which contributes to another major irritation: It takes a level of planning roughly on par with the Normandy invasion to get more than four people to do anything together.

Visiting Chicago back in April, I remembered what it’s like to be in a city with functional public transportation. Even though most of my friends in Chicago are married and many have kids, it was still trivial to be able to go see all of them without a car.

In fact, for a while, I strongly considered moving back to Chicago. A few things stopped me – the size of the tech industry is similar to LA’s: Good, not great. I could have that professional environment with out the expense and general pain in the ass of moving cross-country with my insane cat.

I think another thing that stopped me is a feeling that if I were to move back to Chicago at this point in my career, it would mean giving up. While I recognize it would not be quite that and that I would eventually love to be back there,  I want to come back as a success, not a fledgeling. And if you want to become a success in the tech industry, you need to spend some time in San Francisco.

The fact of the matter is, San Francisco is a great (if obscenely expensive) city. The tech community there is second to none, and I know I could be learning so much more there just by interacting with members of that community.

Every single person I have met there has been incredibly welcoming, and when I tell people I’m thinking about moving up there, the response is unanimously, “Do it.” Well, occasionally it’s “If you can afford it, do it.” But the message is the same.

So I’m mashing the TURN UPSIDE DOWN button on my life one more time. I’ve gotten rid of most of my furniture, I’ll be moving into a great neighborhood in San Francisco where I’m renting a room from a nice queer couple, and learning what does and does not go in the compost bin.

And hopefully, I’m going to end up doing something for a living that I really enjoy. I’ll probably be working independently for a while (hey, did you hear my first app got approved for the iOS App Store and is available both there and on Android Market?), and then hopefully moving on to a bigger team where I’ll be able to learn and do more than I’m able to do as a one-man-band.

But it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life for me. And I’m feelin’ good.

Direct Flickr link here, slideshow #1 below (Note, there are a bunch of adorable videos – you can tell they’re the videos because they only have titles, not notes – of pandas chowing down on bamboo that don’t play through the slideshow, click on the thing that says “link” to be taken directly to the Flickr page to view):

And then as a special bonus, Direct Flickr link and slideshow #2, of a hike I went on with my dad and Ray Ann out in Idaho this past weekend:

More photos to come in the next few days – I’m still plowing through the photos I finally got off my SD card from my recent trip to SF to prep for my move. Way more to come on that.

- Officially finished my last class at UCLA Extension. I got my certificate at the end of last quarter, but I took a “just-in-case” class since they weren’t being terribly clear on whether I’d officially get the certificate until it showed up in the mail.

- Wrote most of my first iPhone application, which I’m hoping to submit for approval by the end of the week. Will hopefully have a self-pimpin’ post on this when it goes up on the App Store.

- Turned 30, felt old for a bit, then felt like this could be the start of a better decade than my 20s, which all in all, were a little nuts.

- Applied for individual health insurance and gone off on multiple rants about the atrocious state of the American medical system to several annoyed insurance brokers, who can’t really do anything about it.

- Tried to figure out what the hell I’m going to be doing, employment-wise. Still working on this.

- Deciding to move in August when my roommate shacks up with her boyfriend. Where am I moving? That’s an excellent question, which will largely depend on my employment situation. Signs are currently pointing heavily to San Francisco, based simply on the amount of opportunity there, but still officially TBD.

So, how have you been?

The bad news is that in order to actually get someone to hire me, I need to start writing applications that will easily indicate to people who are doing the hiring, “See, I know what I’m doing even though I have no professional experience with this!”

This is, as you might imagine, a little time-consuming.

I also have been working on a bunch of other projects, including updating Designated Nerd, my tech consulting/programming website, which is going to get a lot crazier in the months to come. Lots of back-end stuff I need to work on, but we’ll see how it all goes.

I’ll probably post a bit more here when I’ve got some real, published projects to show off, or when something colossally awesome/stupid happens to me.

But for now, I’m just going to have to put up the “PARDON OUR DUST” banner.

Currently in my neighborhood in LA it is 40 degrees. And it is 31 in Chicago. And that wee difference makes me want to stomp my feet like a petulant child before diving under about fifteen layers of blankets to try and sleep, using the cat as a footwarmer.

Though they might have a more reasonable policy on insulation than my building’s “Eh, let the chill leak in. How cold does it get in LA?” philosophy, I am going to be in very deep trouble if I ever have to take a job in a place with a normal climate.

I can ski!

I briefly tried to ski six months after I hurt my ankle and was in such intense, stabbing pain I had to come down after two runs. I hadn’t skied since I had the surgery to fix my ankle almost four years ago, and I was really afraid that with everything this stupid ankle has taken away from me, it was going to take this too.

Since the NU ski trip was at Tahoe this year and a lot of my friends were going (well, in theory – in practice almost half our group got stuck in Chicago due to the blizzard), lift tickets were included, and ski rentals were seriously discounted, I decided to give it a shot. I tried to mentally prepare myself for never being able to ski again, but I’m not going to lie, the thought of not being able to do something I’ve been doing since I was two made me really, really upset.

About five seconds into my first run, I felt a huge burden lift off my shoulders. My ankle was fine. I felt like I’d never stopped skiing. I don’t think I’ve been that happy in a long, long time.

Now all I have to do is start making enough money to be able to afford to go skiing on a regular basis. Also: Probably start weightlifting to get my knees in better shape more than a month before I ski, because sweet god my patellar tendons are STILL mad at me for that one.

School suddenly got to be a lot more work.

My Android programming class is a ton of work (which is good, because I feel like I’m actually learning something in it). I’ve got a group project in another class where I’m doing about 50%-80% of the work in a given week because most everyone else a) is too consumed with their jobs b) doesn’t give a shit or c) both. Going to Tahoe for four days and getting approximately nothing accomplished didn’t help, and I wound up with all my midterms on the same week about a week after I got back. What also didn’t help was…

My damn computer went insane on me.

Kernel panics (complete system crashes, akin to the Windows Blue Screen of Death) galore, to the point where I was getting them hourly by the end of the debacle. I wound up having to drag it to the Apple Store to get a hardware issue ruled out. The good news is that it wasn’t the hardware, the bad news was that it meant I had to completely reinstall my operating system and then reimport all my files, which was a giant, time-consuming pain in the ass.

The biggest downside of it was that it happened right in the middle of my midterm week, so I wound up taking some time where I probably should have been studying and dealing with this horseshit. I’m getting my Database Management midterm back tonight, and I have a feeling I booted a couple questions I probably wouldn’t have if I’d been focused on studying and not on desperately trying to resuscitate my computer.

I’m probably going to have to replace my laptop sometime in the next few months – it’s clearly on its last legs, even with the fresh OS install. The good news is that I was expecting to need to take 4 classes next quarter and I only actually have to take 1, so all the money that I’m saving on classes is basically going to go directly into the New Computer Fund.

Overall though, despite being ridiculously busy, things have been going pretty well. As long as I can make it through the next couple weeks before my group project is due, then I think I’ll survive.

I liked their service. It was simple, it worked solidly, and the price for unlimited backup was pretty reasonable. And then.

There was some fooferal today because Mozy decided to can their unlimited service, and introduce tiered data pricing. I couldn’t remember quite how much I had backed up with them, so I went to check and see exactly how much it was, remembering it was around 100GB.

Huh, I thought when I looked at at my data total. Why is it only 80MB?

Turns out when I installed an update to the Mozy Mac client shortly before I left for Spain in early December, it wiped out all of my backup settings. The only thing that was being backed up for almost two months was my calendar database.

This, as you can imagine, severely pissed me off.

I hadn’t bothered to check that the Mozy client was backing up what I’d told it to backup because that’s just not a setting you think a company’s own software would obliterate, especially after being solid for 2 years.

But somehow, they managed to do it, and I was left flapping in the breeze until the end of Unlimited backup made me actually look at how much (or more accurately, how little) data I had been storing with them.

I chatted with one agent who told me that the files were still on the server, and if I reset my backup settings it would realize what files were already backed up, and only upload the files that were necessary.

When I got a newer version of the backup software up and running, I checked to see how big the upload was going to be. 133 GB, or basically, the entire contents of my hard drive, an upload that would take days at best.

A second agent attempted to reassure me that no, the data really was there, it would compare what was already on the server to what my software was trying to upload and the full upload wouldn’t be anywhere near 133GB.

And I realized: I didn’t believe him. I COULDN’T believe him because his company’s product had fucked up so, so badly that there was no way I could trust what they were telling their employees and in turn their employees were telling me.

I couldn’t trust that what I thought I’d backed up was actually there, and I couldn’t trust that anything I would back up in the future would ever be there. Online backup software is based primarily on trust, and they’d completely blown it.

So I canceled my account, and started the sloooooow process of re-uploading all my data to one of their competitors.

To their credit, Mozy didn’t put up a fight about refunding me the money I paid for December and January, and they offered their apologies. I said thanks, but I really hoped that whatever idiot let that code out into the wild got fired.

I did not add, though I was thoroughly tempted to, “out of a cannon.”