[...] Their laid-back appearance is mirrored in their dialect; their favorite adjectives are "foo," "large-N," and "blah." They can add a "y" to the end of just about any word that passes over their tongue, and for added emphasis throw in as a prefix "super-", "turbo-," or "giga-". So while Steve and John throw out market-savvy terms like "viral marketing," "CPMs," and "weight-average ratchet clauses," Kevin and Max get a dismissive laugh out of that "turbobusinessy" talk. Kevin calls the whole Internet startup-thing "the lottery wheel."

Kevin had taught me about the second key overview concept of Java programming, "Not Caring." The less a building block of code has to care about what other blocks of code are up to, the less likely the bubble-gum bubble will burst. Code that "slopped" was code that was too interdependent, code that made the mistake of caring.

[...] Max said that writing such a program was "a piece of cheese." When Arie heard that, he didn't know what Max meant. Did "a piece of cheese" mean it was easy, like the phrase "a piece of cake," or did it mean something stinky, meaning the simulation would be a rotten program?

[...] They're all business development VPs for one Web site or another or marketing directors or PR flakes or CEOs -- and they all have graduate degrees and come from good schools and used to work in management consulting. They're not all blond and blue-eyed but that's the dominant strain. They all have firm handshakes and can look you in the eye and have big plans to go away on the weekend and aren't absent-minded and know to come out with a laugh when the conversational gambit is mean to provoke one. It's like the Valley crowed was given an en masse Cosmo makeover, given "that MBA look," gentrified just in time for the big Silicon Valley dramatizations and book deals. I looked at the scene, and I thought about how NBC bought into the company, and then it hit me: the party looked like a scene from Friends. As if every actor who hadn't made the cut had been given a job in the Internet division.

This is the cultural scene of late 1998. Programming used to be the bread and butter of high tech, but the in crowd now prefers chapati to bread and creme fraiche to butter. It's all about synergy deals and branding and national advertising.

Max confided how he had been confronting his issues about commitment. He had thought that his freelance status was a way of keeping his priorities straight and protecting himself. He had outrageous fun and brain-candy work, what more could a young guy want? But now he was reseeing it as a lack of attachment in every direction: no job, no kids, no marriage, no love. Did owning a portion of a house and volunteering for a San Mateo Big Brother program count as commitment? His freelance contracts explicitly stated, "Either party may terminate this relationship at any time." "I consider these things and wonder, have I found new and valid lifestyle alternatives, or am I simply a coward?"

Steve Sellers uses this chance to tell everyone on his team that TEN, their dreaded powerhouse rival now backed by Kleiner Perkins, moved into on-line card games by buying a small company called Webdeck, which was just one ex-Oracle programmer working out of his garage. Just one guy! Not so long ago this all-important revenue producer for TEN was a lot smaller than the Big Network. So no thinking, We can't do this. NO thinking, What are we doing playing with the big boys?