Emotional insecurities can be compensated for digitally;

Sam determined to follow Travis' instructions closely. He frowned down at his note. It was hand written, and somewhat aged. "Use the DOS thing to look up the Machine Access thing (Oh, the one that made everyone think you had an Apple,) and find the router feature that lets you turn on MAC address filtering." He wasn't the computer genius that Travis was, but as a Social hack, it was CERTAIN to convince Travis that Sam was taking him seriously. He had once calculated that there were approximately 35,000 MAC addresses possible for every living human being. By Travis' likely application this meant a table look-up on a hacked-into NSA computer for your MAC address, and then a computational process that took 35,000 / (1.7 GHz) seconds. Still, it would be seen to slow them down, and Travis would be appreciative.

Travis' sensationalism was useful for estimates, and Sam could _probably_ make use of his talents in the back room of his advertising department, but as it stood, he made a great inspiration for Sam's new creative project. He took out his old 5 subject college ruled spiral notebook. Ever since high school, he had kept an active one for just such occasions - Travis was an entertaining friend, as well as an excellent security sentry. Dad had always _said_ "Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom." If his recollection didn't do him wrong, it was Leo Tolstoy who first said "Eternal Vigilance is the price of Peace." Well, it was like the one legged soldier said: Freedom was the thing that made it worth the price; peace was worth a lot, but not emasculation.

He recalled what his art professor had told him when he wanted to bring War and Peace to the silver screen. Tolstoy's "War and Peace" had more characters in it than any other book in history; the cast alone would be prohibitive. Hmmmm... good place to get a list of needed code-names for the new social project of allaying Travis' fears. "Ursula," he called, "If we give EVERY_BODY a cut, how much venison sausage do you think we can use, without wasting?"

Ursula was bored, and her internet connection was still under construction. She responded immediately. "About 70 pounds," she said confidently. Sam was a little disappointed. Even if he told Travis to only bring in one deer at a time, he would hit that target before you could turn around. "You think you could make a bunch of batches of venison jerky, just till Travis gets this new bug worked out of his system?" Ursula was sympathetic, but practical. "Sam, I love Travis just as much as you do, but couldn't you just have him boil buckets and buckets of water, like they do when women have babies in the movies?" "I'll see about having him store it somewhere sterile," he replied. "Even _Travis_ will not have the power to believe that the thing that makes it important is the temperature. Knowing him, he'd get a milk pasteurizer and start the thing running from the city WATER LINE, and we'd have a water bill to rival Coca Cola and Ozarka _together_!" Ursula clearly had her own views on this: "I'd do it, and send HIM the BILL!" she responded.

Sam concluded his efforts with the laptop, and returned it. Her "I love you Sam," was genuine, but not as incongruously endearing as it could characteristically be. "You're welcome dear," he murmured. He put away the chit with Router password, WAP password, E-mail address passwords for them both, their MAC addresses, the password to his portable password database application (with online identities and URLs included,) and the admin passwords for both computers into his wallet with his insurance card. Profile passwords were too much too commit to paper. Travis would be over the moon if he even found out what was _already_ committed to paper.