by Paul Jay, CBCNews.ca

You have to hand it to New Jersey computer programmer Bernie Peng: he knows what his girlfriend likes.

In a move sure to make a thousand nerds curse "Why didn 't I think of that?" Peng reprogrammed Tammy Li's favourite video game "Bejeweled," so it would run on a Nintendo DS, and then made it so a ring and wedding proposal would show up on the screen when she reached a certain score.

She said yes and Peng posted the details on his blog.

As the New Jersey Star Ledger reports, that's when Bejeweled makers PopCap got involved:
Instead of being angry that Peng hacked their video game and rewrote it from scratch, company officials were so impressed they offered to pay for part of his wedding to Tammy Li of Basking Ridge.

"Most video game companies would frown on people manipulating their games," said Garth Chouteau, a spokesman for the Seattle company. "But it won him a woman," Chouteau said. "As a bunch of geeks we have to say, 'Bernie, hats off to you.'"

PopCap is paying to give the wedding a Bejeweled theme: supplying copies of the Bejeweled 2 Deluxe game to hand out at the wedding, throwing in $1,000 to decorate the wedding and sending the couple to Seattle as part of their honeymoon.

On the other end of the marriage spectrum, New York playwright Tricia Walsh-Smith has made her divorce proceedings with a Broadway theatre owner public with a scathing YouTube video in which she gives explicit details about their sex life - or lack thereof.

As the Associated Press reports, even jaded New York divorce lawyers say it's the first time they've ever seen YouTube used to make a divorce public.