And the winner is...

Wow. This was an amazing outpouring of creativity for the 5/28/10 Friday Challenge, "Geek Confessional." Tackling the entries is approximately FIFO order:

AJW308, "The Play-by-Mail Game"

Kersley: I like AJ's because all that work was complete vanity. All the interest was in making the game--not playing it.

Henry: I remember the days of play-by-mail, computer moderated games! Several of them tempted me, but the cost per turn always stopped me. You gave us a neat little insight into that world and showed yourself to be a true geek in that you preferred developing the software to making money off of it! Overall, an excellent example of Geek Personality Disorder.

Bruce: This one really hits to the heart of GPD. It's always so much more fun to figure out the process, solve the problem, and write the software than it is to actually maintain and run the thing day-to-day, isn't it? And you wrote it all in BASIC? A man after my own heart. Here's hoping it was five thousand lines of pure spaghetti.

Athor Pel, "The Espresso Machine"

Kersley: I like Athor Pel's because a commercial-grade espresso machine isn't something that would instantly come to mind when thinking about a home repair. And the hard water issue, as well as the loss in impetus to solve it, is beautiful irony.

Henry: You put a lot of work into something you didn't end up using all that much. Very GPD! I can't imagine paying $500 for a fixer upper espresso machine, but that's why it's your story and not mine! I enjoyed it a lot.

Bruce: I could strongly identify with this one, mostly because I recently spent the better part of an evening getting all the hard water crud out of our Bunn Overkill 9000 Perpetual Coffee Maker, or whatever it's actually called. Bunn supplies a special flexible cleaning rod that looks a lot like a tiny plumber's snake for reaming out the pipes and dealing with just this problem. Of course, once you've dislodged all the calcium deposits, your next pot or two of coffee comes out chock full of extra minerals. In all, a wonderful, futile, story.

Ernest T. Scribbler, "The Fountain Pen," Part One | Part Two

Kersley: Mr. Scribbler...oh, wait--he attached the balloon to the nib and wrote that way? Okay, that's funny.

Henry: I remember fountain pens and filling them from an inkwell. Your solution to the ink bladder problem was geekily inspired, as was your plan to greatly increase your writing time by
over filling the balloon with ink. I'm sure the world is much the worse for the loss of your manuscript -- please confirm it was a total loss, wasn't it? But we've all learned an important lesson from your attempts to fix the fountain pen.

Bruce: Now this one, to be honest, creeps me out more than a little, because I have done exactly the same thing: refurbished an old Parker Duofold DeLuxe by replacing its fossilized bladder with a dime-store balloon. The trick is to use the sort of balloon used for making balloon animals, not water grenades, and to trim it to size before attaching it. What possessed you to try to fill the balloon with ink before reassembling the pen?

Stephen117, "The Time Machine,"
Part One | Part Two | Part Three | Part Four | Part Five

Kersley: Is Stephen for real? A 6-8 year old punching holes in paper, writing time words, then stringing into a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey mess? Glorious story.

Henry: Beautiful. I can readily picture you working diligently on your time machine, selecting just the right Legos, punching all the holes, writing down all those words for time. You captured the innocence and imagination of a child and related it without letting the adult in you interfere with the story. Excellently done!

Bruce: For some reason I kept thinking of Kuttner's story, "Mimsy Were the Borogoves." This is a wonderfully well-told story but seems beyond the range of a six-year-old.

Miko, "All in a Day's Waste"

Kersley: Miko's "All in a Day's Waste" is okay....

Henry: Sometimes what we learn from our repairs is more valuable than the repair itself. Either that, of this is an example of "If it ain't (very) broke, don't fix it."

Bruce: Let's get together. I've got all these NOS Texas Instruments IC's leftover from some audio gear I wound up not repairing back in the early 1980s, and if we can just find a flux capacitor and an arc reactor...

Miko, "THPBPT!"

Kersley: ...but "THPBPT!" is so rich in detail and irony.

Henry: At least you know what to do with the right-rear speaker plus you didn't have to actually park your car somewhere for two months like the guy in the story about the hybrid car. No, you just had to park the interior of your car somewhere for two or three weeks! Nicely told, with an ironic ending.

Bruce: A wonderfully, fiddly, ridiculous story—even when I had the patience to re-cone speakers, it never would have occurred to me to replace just the foam surrounds. But... You don't pack a set of Torx drivers? And you needed to borrow your dad's Crescent wrench? What, a vicegrips and a slightly rounded-off philips screwdriver aren't good enough for you?

Kersley Fitzgerald, "The Mower"

Kersley: [no comments, obviously]

Henry: I don't think I've ever had anything more than a 3.5 HP lawnmower, so I can understand the sultry call of the 6.75 HP Craftsman! I doubt I'd have been so enamored that I'd have tried to fix it, though. Then again, I've never had a lawn mower break while I was unemployed. Neat story, well written as always.

Bruce: This story reminds me very much of all the time I've spent pouring through the Numrich catalog, looking for some fiddly-but-critical screw or spring I've needed to get some old wall-hanger back into working condition. Bravo!

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Summary:

Kersley: The gist of the original story seems to be taking something that's broken and can be easily (if expensively) replaced and, instead, spending many man-hours fixing it--and having it work. If that be so, I'm going for Athor. Miko's stereo speaker story is in there, but the geek factor only comes into play when he chooses to replace the foam instead of installing all new speakers; he'd still have to take his car half-apart to put in new speakers.

Henry: There were some really good stories this week, but the one that really grabbed me was Stephen117's tale of building the time machine. It fit the challenge while also coming completely out of left field; an unexpected pleasure.

Bruce: I'm torn. I keep wanting to ask just which computer AJW308 wrote that BASIC program on, I feel a profound affinity for Athor's espresso machine story, and I am awestruck by Miko's speaker story. Man, I have never done anything even half that fiddly and tedious. However, after reading the comments, it seems Stephen117's time machine was the clear reader favorite, and Henry has lobbied hard for it to win. So...

Okay, it's Stephen117 for the win this week, with honorable mentions to AJW308, Athor Pel, and Miko and a suspicious sideways glare at Scribbler. And thanks to everyone who entered!