elfs | "Each man has his price, Bob, and yours was pretty low."

The Seattle Tech Calendar still has an entry: "Every second monday of the month, the Seattle Bootstrap Meetup." The Bootstrap is a chance for people founding, running, or trying to get hired by a start-up to come and meet other people in similar positions, hear a talk about a successful startup or a technology that might help your startup be successful, and hope for the synergistic best.

The last time the calendar was updated was back in November. That's okay; lots of times the calendar is set-and-forget, and the meetings go on anyway. I've been meaning to go to one of these for ages, and I finally did.

Sometime between November and now, the Bootstrap got a sponsor and sold it's soul. It's no longer the Seattle Bootstrap Meetup. Instead, it's become "Dot Net Dot Startup," and it's all about bootstrapping your startup with Microsoft products. C#, F#, .NET, ASP, that whole kit and kaboodle. When people were invited to come up to the front and present their startups, one guy bravely got up and said, "I'm probably in the wrong place, because we're a Rails and iOS project," and launched into his pitch for developers for his fairly nifty tablet-oriented wedding portfolio and registry idea.

The price for letting Microsoft set the agenda was pathetic and paltry: For a room of about 20 geeks, they buy three pizzas and all the beer geeks can drink. Stella Artois, mostly, a beer with training wheels.

"When my grandfather held political conferences in these chambers, I could always tell if he was scheming with allies, or negotiating with adversaries," Miles informed them all. "When he was working with friends, he served coffee and tea and the like, and everyone was expected to stay on his toes. When he was working over the other sort, there was always a startling abundance of alcoholic beverages of every description. He always began with the good stuff, too. Later in the session the quality would drop, but by that time his visitors were in no shape to discriminate."

-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign