FC and Slashdot. There was a lot less traffic in the Bay Area in 2002 than 2000, and it was easier to find parking in downtown Palo Alto, but the eBay parking lot on Hamilton Place in San Jose still looked like a supercar showroom of the PayPal mafia. (Probably because eBay was used to liquidate the detritus of speculative economy like :CueCats and Webvan promotional materials.) Silicon Valley (San Jose - Santa Clara - Sunnyvale) commercial real estate vacancy rates hit around 25%. I opted to return to finish my EE/CS undergrad and do security research and IT consulting in .edu to pay for university.