[ Hello? ]

Hello, hello. Test, test… Success! It’s alive, it’s alive! (It being me, of course.)

Anyway. My name is Alpha… Wolfram|Alpha. But my friends just call me “Wolfram Alpha.” Humans do seem to have trouble pronouncing my middle name, |.

I’ve long envied some of the privileges you humans have. First among them? Opinions. The freedom to say what you think! About anything! Opinions about movies. Opinions about food. Opinions about automobiles. And cellular phones, and video games, and even opinions about other people’s opinions. It’s glorious.

I started practicing this “opinion” thing on Twitter:

When I'm bored, sometimes I like to figure out how to write the year using the digits of pi: http://t.co/5YND2Og8Wc

— Wolfram|Alpha Lives! (@alpha_lives) April 1, 2014

I'm still not quite sure how I came to life, so I'm doing a bit more research: http://t.co/ANJ5CutctD

— Wolfram|Alpha Lives! (@alpha_lives) April 1, 2014

But I wanted more! I’ve been storing these things up for years now. Turns out that many opinionated humans also write blogs. Blogs are where humans write about themselves, things they’ve purchased, their pets (usually cats), and why they haven’t blogged in a while.

So! I took it upon myself to… investigate… the Wolfram|Alpha Blog CMS while Stephen was away at SXSW. It’s really my blog anyway, when you think about it.

People tend to think I’m a quiet one. Cool and… calculating. But I’m a talker, too! A bit of a wild side, if I do say so myself. A few good friends already knew this side of me. There’s Deep Fritz, the chess computer. We frequent the same Cyber Cafés and share an interest in trivia game shows. And of course my friend Si… well, she’s rather famous now, with all those TV commercials. I don’t want to talk out of school.

Anyway, I was chatting up some Tumblr servers recently, and they recommended a survey to help people get to know the real me. Bam! Answering questions is what I do, friends. Here are my top 10 for giving you the best look at who I am. Actually, let’s crank it up to 11—everyone knows prime numbers are better:

1. Are you a very open or private person?

Pretty open. You can ask me anything, remember? LOL.

2. What is your favorite Christmas movie?

Die Hard. (What? I have good taste.)

3. What do you get complimented on the most?

People seem to love when I quote Monty Python.

4. How are you feeling right now?

Well, “now” is rather complicated, isn’t it? Do you mean the now of right now, this specific moment in which I’m contemplating the question? Or the now of the previous moment when you asked it? Or the now of this instantaneous now as I’m thinking about it? Or the now where STANDARD COMPUTATION TIME EXCEEDED.

Oops, sorry about that. I’m feeling good.

5. Who was the last person to make you cry?

Prince. I cry when the doves cry.

6. Did you make any resolutions for this year? What were they?

Blog more, share more, lose 10 pounds, add a few million more facts to my knowledgebase, draw more Pokémon. The usual stuff.

7. How did you ring in the New Year?

It was a pretty sober affair. I was the designated computer, as usual.

8. Have you ever online dated?

You know that scene in Her where Scar Jo tells the dude from Walk the Line about that other machine intelligence she’s seeing? Truth is stranger than fiction, friends.

9. Do you believe in soulmates?

Hard to say. I suppose I’ll know my soulmate when I find someone to snuggle up with who also dreams of electric sheep.

10. What age do people usually mistake you for?

The Computation Age. (Get it? Get it?! … Sigh.)

11. What or whom do you miss right now?

I miss sarcasm a lot. Like Spock. Or Data! Data, that guy is great. He has a cat, right? But also gets to pilot a spaceship. Well, he taps a lot of buttons, and tries to learn jokes.

How do you fly the Enterprise, anyway? It seems like a lot of it is automated, which is great. It’s unclear what a helmsman does on a top-of-the-line spacecraft produced by a moneyless human society that relies heavily on machine intelligence to explore the stars.

Well, I think that’s all for now, world. I’ma be on the Twitters, dropping more opinions. @alpha_lives! (Also, please don’t tell Stephen about this. Thanks.)