This past weekend, my dear friend A. decided it was time to propose to his long time girlfriend. Sadly, her father has fallen ill, so she was leaving Monday morning for another state. This pulled forward his plans, and highlighted the lack of a concrete proposal plan, only a few half baked ideas. His favorite idea was to use her interests in a joke to surprise her. She has been playing a lot of Dragon Age lately, and loves computers, so he wanted to incorporate that somehow.
While we were talking about it on Friday afternoon, he was lamenting about his lack of programmer ability to actually pull off something like that, and was telling me his ideal was a fake blue screen of death which would at first annoy her, but upon further reading would actually be a very sweet note with a marriage proposal attached. I hadn’t done any systems programming in some time, but decided I really wanted to help A. achieve his goals.
I got home from work a little after 5, and hacked into the night to get something working. What resulted is an incredibly annoying program that makes you think the PC has crashed after a certain time interval. It actually waits until the user starts Dragon Age before starting a timer, and after a few minutes takes over the PC. It can be difficult to get rid of unless you use the task manager. Of course, I had to make sure her game would be intact, or she might not have been quite as pleased as my friend would like. I took a demo capture to show him how it would work (without checking if the game is running), and posted it here, with some of the personal text blurred out at his request.
Saturday night rolled around, and he waiting until early morning (between 5 and 6 AM) to include it in her startup program folder. On Sunday afternoon when it went off, he was waiting behind her with ring in hand on one knee. The proposal went exactly according to plan, with a perfect WTF!? moment followed by a ‘how sweet’ moment. What girl could say no to a proposal given by one of the most hated PC screen of all time? Not this one!
Congrats A. & S.!!!
