Of course, the stock market had to come roaring back and it had to be extra sunny on the very day I was scheduled to have lunch with well-known Silicon Valley investor Ron Conway to talk about the worrisome state of the digital sector.

After all, it was Conway (pictured here), as well as Sequoia Capital, who sent out a stink bomb of an email last week to his start-ups to deliver a simple message: The Web 2.0 party is over.

Said Conway to his entrepreneurial troops as the market was crashing down and smacking tech companies hard in the process:

“Unfortunately history DOES repeat itself but I hope we can learn from history and prevent the turmoil from occurring again. The message is simple. Raising capital will be much more difficult now … the name of the game in this environment in some respects is survival–survival until conditions change.”

Survival!?! What ho? This from the man who is one of the more upbeat of Web investors! Who is one of the backers of Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Ning, Seesmic and 125 other Web 2.0 companies?

Ironically, our lunch yesterday was little more than a year after I had had another lunch with Conway, where I also made a video, and during which we had a lively discussion about a range of topics, including the venture business (better than ever!), innovation (better than better than ever!), monetizing video content on the Web (best of all!) and more.

Yesterday, the news was not so happy, of course, although Conway did try to explain in more detail exactly what he meant in his most recent email, which echoed one he had also sent out when the last Internet bubble was popping a half-dozen years ago.

And that is: You better have a year’s worth of cash and a revenue model or you’re toast.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, he’s bullish!

Here’s the video (and below it, the one from June 2007, when things looked a little sunnier for Conway and Web 2.0):

For some reason, none of the half-dozen SVPs and EVPs I spoke to, who attended a lunch that Yahoo (YHOO) CEO Jerry Yang held yesterday for several dozen top-level execs, wanted to tell me exactly what was on the menu, because they did not want to reveal that kind of precise detail.

Fish sticks? Corn dogs? A lovely club sandwich with applewood bacon? No dice!

But no one could stop talking about the unhappiness they felt over the possible deal Yang was concocting with AOL (TWX), as an alternate to the unsolicited bid made by Microsoft (MSFT).

And they don’t like Yahoo even pursuing it as a means to get Microsoft to pay more, because it could threaten that deal, which could result in Microsoft pulling out and Yahoo stock plummeting.

“It is a very dangerous game of chicken,” said one. “And Yahoo has never been really good at that anyway.”

To be fair, after talking to dozens of employees at all levels of the company, I have found overall feelings are genuinely mixed about a Microsoft takeover of Yahoo too–they like the muscle, money and mass Microsoft brings, but are nervous to become employees of the controversial company.

But, so far, no one I have talked to wants Yahoo to hook up with AOL, including everyone I spoke to yesterday who was at the lunch, all of whom consider the Time Warner property slow-moving, weak in technology and saddled with a largely dispirited staff.

“We have enough problems without getting theirs, which are much worse,” said one exec. “No one here, except Jerry and the board, has any enthusiasm for it.”

Added another: “I cannot believe they would put our amazing assets with those who we don’t really respect, for the most part, and think that’s OK.”

And a third: “We are tired of all the noise and the angling [of this takeover] and most of us just want something to get done… This is completely distracting for employees and makes it hard to manage the big businesses we all have.”

Thus, the overall impression I carried away from my interviews? Extreme Takeover: Fatigue Edition.

Still, apparently no one explicitly voiced their concerns to Yang at the lunch, which has become a regular gathering he has been holding with top-level talent for several months now.

Instead, yesterday’s lunch topics included many things, including discussion of retention packages that are being used at Yahoo to keep valued employees from bolting, which have become an important tool over the last several months.

In addition, Yang went over some other HR issues, as well as stressing how top managers should handle messaging to the troops. (Use that old catch-all: “We are exploring all our options.”)

Yang did talk about the AOL deal, in general terms, said those in attendance, noting that the combination of Yahoo’s and AOL’s online display advertising made for a strong offering. He also praised AOL’s ad network and how it would be more powerful integrated with Yahoo’s.

(And one bright spot that everyone mentioned was AOL’s recent acquisition of Bebo, which Yahoo also looked at. But everyone also thought AOL had egregiously overpaid for the third-ranked social-networking site, which they hoped would not impact relative valuation between the companies.)

But, so far, the troops remain solidly dubious and hope for a better outcome than a mashup with AOL.

“Look, Microsoft would not be my first choice either,” said one exec, who noted, like a lot of others, that both companies did bring lots of important traffic to Yahoo. “But AOL is not even my third.”

Please see this disclosure related to me and Google.

So far, no dice!

I don’t know why, but it might have to do with Yang wanting to be sealed in a non-press bubble, while he does his 100-day evaluation of the company (although he has certainly gotten out and about in Silicon Valley, visiting everyone and their cousins in the tech sector of late).

Or maybe they don’t like the ongoing leaks to me and other reporters about the company’s doings from, well, everyone with an Internet connection at Yahoo (and that does not include the people who have left of late, of whom there are many).

So much is the displeasure that Yang made an impassioned plea to staunch the uncontrolled flow of tidbits about the company to the hundreds of VPs he gathered almost a week ago at what some who attended are now calling the “Kumbaya Summit.”

Though uninvited, I wrote a detailed account of the meeting, which included an appearance by Apple’s Steve “Oprah” Jobs, from such sources.

At the meeting, Yang argued that these alleged leakers, whom I would rather compare to whistle-blowers, were harming the company.

I don’t know about that, as I think most of them truly care about Yahoo, but feel frustrated with the leadership and want to do something to get things moving.

(And let’s hope execs there don’t get all vindictive and conduct a press-leaking witch hunt to find any of these employees, because I know that will only result in filling my inbox with even more juicy scoops for a long time to come.)

So it’s freeze time for BoomTown and we must remedy this sad state of affairs (see this nice picture above of Yang and other Yahoo co-founder David Filo at D3 with Walt and me in happier times).

But better yet: What if we could mend our relationship and also do good at the same time! And BoomTown readers can help.

In September, I wrote a post about a cool charity site called DonorsChoose.org, which funds classroom projects in high-need public schools, using the Web to match teacher project requests with donors.

The site allows teachers nationwide to upload proposals for resources and projects–from books to playgrounds–they need funding for and matches them with donors.

DonorsChoose then authenticates every project proposal before posting it, buys the resources when a project is funded and sends the goods off to teachers, with some donors also adding more money to pay for fulfillment costs.

Now, in the month of October, it has launched a “Blogger Challenge,” wrangling some bloggers to compete to raise money among our readers by picking favorite projects and setting a fund-raising goal.

Here is the AllThingsD page on the DonorsChoose site, and you can also access it using the nifty fund-raising thermometer on the left rail of this page.

I picked tech projects in both San Francisco (where I live) and Washington, D.C. (where Walt Mossberg lives) and we have set a goal of $25,000.

Some of the other bloggers involved, besides me, include Peter Rojas of Engadget, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Anil Dash of Six Apart, Fred Wilson of A VC, Lockhart Steele (formerly of Gawker) on his Curbed and Eater blogs, Apartment Therapy and Tomato Nation.

And Web companies are also participating: Google is giving an award for the bloggers who raise the most money, Six Apart an award for the bloggers who help the greatest number of students and Federated Media will award the bloggers who come up with the most creative incentives for readers to give.

We hope to win that too, via our dastardly master plan of winning the award Yahoo is giving. The company is sponsoring an award for the bloggers who inspire the most readers to give and the winner will get a free lunch with Jerry Yang!

That’s where you come in! I need numbers! Hundreds! Thousands! From Yahoo’s troops even!

Even Yang agrees!

“The DonorsChoose.org Blogger Challenge could inspire the blogosphere to help hundreds of thousands of students from low-income communities,” said Yang in the press release from DonorsChoose about the challenge. “This challenge represents a great union of citizen journalists and citizen philanthropists. Yahoo is excited to see which bloggers can engage the most readers in improving our public schools.”

In point of fact, Yahoo has been very generous to DonorsChoose, giving out donation certificates to its employees, helping in the charity’s tech build-out and being uniformly generous in making donations.

Sure, you can get riveted to TechMeme’s new Leaderboard (we’re No. 45! we’re No. 45!) if you want to know where you rank with a bunch of fellow bloggers or you can pick your little head up and look at the wide world out there in desperate need of some geek-fueled help.

Yes, we can! And, as a reward for your generosity to those in need, I will make a video for you of Yang munching on a grilled cheese sandwich!

Also below is a video I did of DonorsChoose Founder Charles Best, talking about the charity:

And here again is the AllThingsD page on the DonorsChoose site.