It’s spring. Love is in the air. So, if you’re a geek, madly in love, and dead set on getting married to your sweetheart, how do you go about it?

Maybe this will give you some inspiration. Here are bunch of marriage proposals, geek style.

(After the big report yesterday, we thought it was time to lighten things up a bit. )

Propose in an online comic

If you’re the creator of a popular online comic, this one is easy, as proven by Mike Krahulik, one of the guys behind Penny Arcade.

But even if you’re not a comics creator, you may be able to enlist the help of one. The guys behind Joy of Tech helped one of their readers make this a reality.

Propose on Twitter

Twitter getting increasingly popular, and apparently, so is proposing on Twitter.

Aside from the above example, it’s happened again and again.

Propose in a video game

Proposing by modifying video game maps seems to be something of a trend. Here is one actual proposal made in Halo 3:

Here is another one made in Super Smash Bros:

And one made in Little Big Planet (video):

But the price has to go to this guy who wrote an actual Bejeweled clone from scratch for the Nintendo DS so he could surprise his girl (it was her favorite game). After a certain score had been reached, a ring popped up.

Propose in an O’Reilly book

Author Dave Nielsen proposed in the acknowledgements section of his book, Paypal Hacks, published by O’Reilly. He had to wait three months for the book to be published before he could get his answer (she said yes).

The acknowledgement read:

I’d like to thank […] and Erika, my inspiration, who makes me smile every day. Erika, I feel so lucky to have found you. With you, every day is beautiful and new. Nothing would make me happier than to spend the rest of my life with you…Erika Anderson, will you marry me?

Propose via Google Street View

Here is a proposal made by a Google employee using Google Street View. He even created a special website for it (MarryMeLeslie.com) where people could vote if the should say yes or no.

Propose via a search engine

Here is a marriage proposal that was made possible by the help of the Ask Jeeves team. The girl in question got her proposal when she searched for her own name.

Propose with a string of amino acids

We found this story in the comments to a Wired article about geeky proposals and thought it deserved a mention here.

My wife was a college professor when we were dating; I was studying biochemistry. I wrote a perl script that treated the letters of my proposal as a string of amino acids, translating them to a corresponding mRNA transcript. Then I sent her an email, claiming I needed help with my biochem homework: translating an mRNA to amino acids.

Later, in her office, she fired up DNAstar, translated the message, looked at the peptide sequence a while, then said, “This mRNA is messed up: the first residue isn’t even a methionine… it’s not polyadenylated… HEY!!” Once she saw her name at the beginning of the sequence, it was all over.

This year is our sixth anniversary, and we have a beautiful 4 1/2-year-old daughter.

These two literally had good chemistry…

Propose via your favorite SFF author

How about this: Someone enlisted none other than author and comic book legend Neil Gaiman to help him propose to his girlfriend during a book signing. Gaiman wrote “Will you marry Jason?” when he signed her book, but the girl in question was so star-struck that the author had to point it out to her three times before she actually noticed what it said.

Propose with charts

A post on the I Can Has Cheezburger sister site GraphJam contained a proposal in graph format. Sadly she said no, so hopefully it didn’t end up on the other I Can Has Cheezburger sister site: the Fail Blog.

Propose on a geek news site

Slashdot founder Rob Malda (CmdrTaco) proposed to his girlfriend with a news story on Slashdot. 15 minutes later he had a yes.

Propose with Apple hardware

Apple hardware engraved with proposals seems to be popular, especially iPods.

Enlist the help of video game legends

When 1UP editor-in-chief James Mielke decided to propose to his girlfriend, he managed to get two of the creators of the legendary Final Fantasy series to help him out. Artist/designer Yoshitaka Amano designed a ring for him, and composer Nobuo Uematsu wrote a melody that was played as he proposed. (Both Mielke and his bride-to-be are huge Final Fantasy fans.)

Propose with a patent application

There are a lot of different kinds of geeks, and we suspect this guy may well be a patent lawyer aficionado. Who else would propose with a 12-page patent application?

Small sample (emphasis added by us):

The purpose of this invention is to provide an improved method of proposing marriage to an individual. The method of proposing to an individual generally comprising the steps of meeting the individual; exchanging names with the individual; dating the individual (not necessary); drafting a government document having a proposal to marry the individual incorporated therein; and showing the government document to the individual. The government document may be a patent application. The patent application may claim the method by which the proposor will make a marriage proposal to the individual. The proposor could then use the method claimed in the patent application to propose to the individual. The patent application could be the actual marriage proposal.

Propose with a lolcat

This is the second entry from I Can Has Cheezburger, a proposal in true lol fashion.

What’s your favorite geeky proposal?

We here at Pingdom are definitely geeks (and proud of it), but we pale in comparison to some of the guys above.

Believe it or not, the examples we have listed above are just the tip of the iceberg, and most of them seem to have been successful. There are a ton of good stories out there. If you feel we missed any other great examples (we probably have), let us know in the comments!

The New England Patriots held what seemed to be a commanding lead (17-15) with five minutes left of Super Bowl XLVI last night. But the New York Giants came back and managed to win with 21-17.

As exciting as the game sounds, we missed the whole thing, instead spending our time watching the Superbowl.com website.

It turned out to be a rather dull thing to do because the site held up well and there was no downtime at all. The response time also didn’t give away anything significant in terms of online Super Bowl traffic.

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As Super Bowl 46 is approaching, fans will flock to the Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana, and to TV sets around the world to follow the New York Giants battle it out with the New England Patriots.

Kickoff is scheduled for 6:30EST on Sunday, February 5, and we’re already monitoring Superbowl.com to see how the site will handle the event.

What team will win Super Bowl 46? How will the site cope? We can only wait to find out.

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Every Friday we bring you a collection of links to places on the web that we find particularly newsworthy, interesting, entertaining, and topical. We try to focus on some particular area or topic each week, but in general we will cover Internet, web development, networking, performance, and other geeky topics.h

This week we bring you a collection of articles focusing on cloud, with a few other topics thrown in to boot.

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Out of the 59 US-based e-commerce sites we monitored during the holiday season last year 28 scored a perfect 100% uptime for December.

Whether this helped spur on the booming sales in the US, we don’t know, but retail e-commerce spending in the US reached $37.2 billion for the November to December 2011 period. That was an increase of 15% from the same period in 2010.

We decided to dig into the numbers for these e-commerce sites to see how well they did in terms of uptime and performance. After massaging the data coming from our Pingdom probes, it turns out that the sites overall performed well during December 2011 in terms of uptime, but response time was an issue for several sites.

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Pingdom’s Mobile Podcast is a weekly show about Internet, web, and mobile stuff.

In this show, Saleh also gives us an update on the pending submission of his Carbon for Windows Phone Twitter client. We’re also joined by Mario Lurig, who talks about using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront to speed up a website.

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