Techy Wedding Proposals

Happy Memorial Day!

Since I went to a wedding this weekend, I decided to do a week-long series on what techies do when they get married, starting with proposals!

I will start with the people I know personally. Colin McMillen, who worked in the same robotics lab at Carnegie Mellon that I did, proposed to his wife using obfuscated Perl code. His program was written in the shape of a heart and ended with "be $mine for @ever" and when run, printed out "kristen, will you marry me?". Her response was "$propose++; Yes :)".

            #!/usr/bin/perl -w
            use strict;

                 my$f=           $[;my
               $ch=0;sub       l{length}
             sub r{join"",   reverse split
            ("",$_[$[])}sub ss{substr($_[0]
            ,$_[1],$_[2])}sub be{$_=$_[0];p
             (ss($_,$f,1));$f+=l()/2;$f%=l 
              ();$f++if$ch%2;$ch++}my$q=r
               ("\ntfgpfdfal,thg?bngbj".    
                "naxfcixz");$_=$q; $q=~
                  tr/f[a-z]/ [l-za-k] 
                    /;my@ever=1..&l
                      ;my$mine=$q
                        ;sub p{
                         print
                          @_;
                           }
                                     
                   be $mine for @ever 

_{code by Colin McMillen}

My big sister from my sorority has one my favorite proposal stories. Her husband Ethan is a roboticist who works with Sony AIBOs in a lab that cooperated with my former lab. His proposal involved three of these robotic dogs "stealing and hiding" the ring as he tried to propose to her. I will let you read her story as told with her own words.



And now onto a random techy strangers whose proposal stories I found interesting. Switched already did this topic with their Eight Best Techie Marriage Proposals, but here are some highlights.

Earlier this year, a Xanga user posted about his techy proposal story. Bernie knew that his girlfriend Tammy really enjoyed playing Bejeweled. He wrote a DS version such that once she hit a certain score, a ring would drop down.



One person used a iPhone ad spoof seen here:



Others included engraving an iPod and cooperating with a search engine.

If you're not tired yet of techy proposal stories, you can wander over to the Wikipedia entry on Online Proposals. Look for Wednesday's entry on robot-themed weddings and Friday's entry on Tips for Techies on honeymoons!