In a small hollow carved out of the back, Kurt had arranged a cluttered desk, a scuffed twin bed and a rack of milk crates filled with t-shirts and underwear. Alan picked his way delicately through the store and found himself a seat on an upturned milk crate. Kurt sat on the bed and grinned expectantly. "So?" he said. "So what?" Alan said. "So what is *this*! Isn't it great?" "Well, you sure have a lot of *stuff,* I'll give you that," Alan said. "It's all dumpstered," Kurt said casually. "Oh, you dive?" Alan said. "I used to dive." It was mostly true. Alan had always been a picker, always on the lookout for bargoons, even if they were sticking out of someone's trash bin. Sometimes *especially* if they were sticking out of someone's trash bin -- seeing what normal people threw away gave him a rare glimpse into their lives. Kurt walked over to the nearest shelving unit and grabbed a PC mini-tower with the lid off. "But did you ever do this?" He stuck the machine under Alan's nose and swung the gooseneck desk lamp over it. It was a white-box PC, generic commodity hardware, with a couple of network cards. "What's that?" "It's a junk access point! I made it out of trash! The only thing I bought were the network cards -- two wireless, one Ethernet. It's running a FreeBSD distribution off a CD, so the OS can never get corrupted. It's got lots of sweet stuff in the distro, and all you need to do is plug it in, point the antennae in opposite directions, and you're up. It does its own power management, it automagically peers with other access points if it can find 'em, and it does its own dynamic channel selection to avoid stepping on other access points." Alan turned his head this way and that, making admiring noises. "You made this, huh?" "For about eighty bucks. It's my fifteenth box. Eventually, I wanna have a couple hundred of these." "Ambitious," Alan said, handing the box back. "How do you pay for the parts you have to buy? Do you have a grant?" "A grant? Shit, no! I've got a bunch of street kids who come in and take digital pix of the stuff I have no use for, research them online, and post them to eBay. I split the take with them. Brings in a couple grand a week, and I'm keeping about fifty street kids fed besides. I go diving three times a week out in Concord and Oakville and Richmond Hill, anywhere I can find an industrial park. If I had room, I'd recruit fifty more kids -- I'm bringing it in faster than they can sell it." "Why don't you just do less diving?" "Are you kidding me? It's all I can do not to go out every night! You wouldn't believe the stuff I find -- all I can think about is all the stuff I'm missing out on. Some days I wish that my kids were less honest; if they ripped off some stuff, I'd have room for a lot more."