"...as possible, under the circumstances," she said and laughed. "It's a Canadian joke, but it applies equally well to Californians. So you were in B-school when?" "Ninety eight to 2001. Interesting times to be in the Valley. I read your column, you know." She looked down at her plate. A lot of people had read the column back then. Women columnists were rare in tech, and she supposed she was good at it, too. "I hope I get remembered as more than the chronicler of the dot-com boom, though," she said. "Oh, you will," he said. "You'll be remembered as the chronicler of this -- what Kettlewell and Perry and Lester are doing." "What you're doing, too, right?" "Oh, yes, what I'm doing too." A robot rollerbladed past on the boardwalk, turning the occasional somersault. "I should have them build some of those," Tjan said, watching the crowd turn to regard it. It hopped onto and off of the curb, expertly steered around the wandering couples and the occasional homeless person. It had a banner it streamed out behind it: CAP'N JACKS PAINTBALL AND FANBOAT TOURS GET SHOT AND GET WET MIAMI KEY WEST LAUDERDALE. "You think they can?" "Sure," Tjan said. "Those two can build anything. That's the point: any moderately skilled practitioner can build anything these days, for practically nothing. Back in the old days, the blacksmith just made every bit of ironmongery everyone needed, one piece at a time, at his forge. That's where we're at. Every industry that required a factory yesterday only needs a garage today. It's a real return to fundamentals. What no one ever could do was join up all the smithies and all the smiths and make them into a single logical network with a single set of objectives. That's new and it's what I plan on making hay out of. This will be much bigger than dot-com. It will be much harder, too -- bigger crests, deeper troughs. This is something to chronicle all right: it will make dot-com look like a warm up for the main show. "We're going to create a new class of artisans who can change careers every 10 months, inventing new jobs that hadn't been imagined a year before." "That's a pretty unstable market," Suzanne said, and ate some fish.