Hasta La Gadget!

Propose to your girlfriend with technology and you’re bound to get blogged.

There’s
no shame in that, though. If the idea of Cupid were conceived in modern times,
he’d probably be sending messages through an RSS reader rather than shooting
arrows with a bow, right?

OK, probably not. But even so, geeks have come a long way since they were mocked and despised a couple decades ago. Now that we know nerdiness can lead to fame, power and riches, it’s possible to be a geek and get the girl. To prove the point,
we’ve rounded up a list of the geekiest, tech-inspired marriage
proposals that were sweet enough to work. They might even get a cold, dead heart like
mine thumping a little.

Proposal 2.0

Michael Weiss-Malik, a Google employee, deserves a lot of credit for this one. What better way to show the world your love than displaying it on Google Maps? Weiss-Malik got his buddies on the Street View team
to give him a heads-up on the next time the Street View car was coming
out to take pictures. And when that day came, he was well-prepared,
holding a banner that read "Proposal 2.0: Marry me Leslie!!" (see above) After
that, all he had to was lure Leslie into loading Google Maps and zooming in on
the precise coordinates of his romantic stunt.

Now, that’s clever.

iPropose with iPhone

We’ve
heard two stories of tech-savvy Casanovas using their iPhones to
propose to their girlfriends. Just this week Bryan Haggerty coded a
custom iPhone application to send his girlfriend Jeannie Chou on a
scavenger hunt throughout San Francisco. The web app included a map
containing location points, each one accompanied with a video providing
clues on where to go next. In the end, the map points connected to form
a <3, and the final destination was the top of a hill in Dolores
Park, where Haggerty busted out the big question. Tell us that isn’t
cute.

And then there’s Dan Deeble, who concocted a similar idea in
October 2008. He found an iPhone app called Scribular, which works with the
handset’s GPS and allows users to tag locations with notes. Deeble put
on his geeky-romantic thinking hat, and he came up with a creative way
to use Scribular. He drove around Sacramento, leaving notes for his
partner Crystal Gardner at various locations. He loaded Scribular on
her iPhone, too, and had her friends calling her throughout the day,
telling her to check the app. Finally the two met at a restaurant,
where Gardner checked Scribular one more time to see another note:
"Almost one year ago, I found you — and I found love…. I ask if you
will grant me the greatest privilege of my life and marry me. Forever
yours, Dan."

Awwww.

Playing games with her heart

YouTube user TheRealPfhreak’s proposal method was arduous, not to mention retro nerdy. He hacked a ROM  of the old Super Nintendo role-playing game Chrono Trigger while
his girlfriend was playing through it. Before tweaking some of the
game’s dialogue to ask her to marry him, he modded the game to recreate
some of their favorite memories such as stargazing and dancing. And he
even added in her favorite song lyrics from The Princess Bride. Whoever said nerdy computer scientists couldn’t be romantic?

Virtual diamonds

Game geek Bernie hacked his way
into his lady’s heart, too. He modded his girlfriend Tammy’s favorite
game, Bejeweled, to work on a Nintendo DS. Only, it was slightly
different: At some point the jewel pieces formed the shape of a diamond
ring, which he used to pop out the question. Looks like it took a lot
of time, but it’s safer than buying an actual ring, right? Just kidding
— he got her one of those, too.