Random Scrap:
I met Jan for a coffee at one of the cafes in Berkeley. She must have been in sixties and she had contacted me a few days earlier looking for help in her web design business. We would agree on the price of [twenty] dollars par hour and from now on we would be meeting in the mornings with me teaching her Dreamweaver and then helping her with small projects for her clients. We drank coffee in the morning and then sat at her garage converted into a studio staring at a big monitor screen. She was a writer and an editor so she had many connections to the artistic world of the Bay Area bringing her clients and coming out with design while I would be supporting her on the technical side. It was maybe not enough money in the long term but the deal was a perfect combination. Later when I applied for a job at Google sitting in the interview room for three hours I didn't know it yet that I was going to trade-off that insecure but somehow exciting and quite world to something that was more grounded, predictable, on a bigger scale.