I was reading /. today, (can’t remember what the subject was, but it isn’t really important), and a poster was portraying Microsoft as evil and google as honest, true, good and all American. Now, I know Microsoft has been persona non grata on the /. since before time began, but how is it that google isn’t at least equally evil? All they want to do is index our lives and sell it back to us one piece at a time. At least when Microsoft was the main corporate overlord in the computer industry, we had some pretence of privacy.

Today Tristan was asking me about Transformers again. This pleases me because this is the list of the things that I am somewhat expert in (no particular order):

• Transformers
• C/C++
• Star Trek
• Perl
• Doctor Who
• Photography
• Thursday Next
• Never Being Confused

Anyway, he was asking me about where the Transformers came from and I told him about Primus and Unicron, the gods of the Transformers. This is sort of how it went:

me: Primus and Unicron are the gods of the Transformers. Primus created the transformers to battle the evil Unicron.
Tristnan: Did Unicron create the Decepticons to fight the Autobots?
me: No, Primus created both the Autobots and the Decepticons
Tristan: Why did he create them just to fight each other?

I really love the questions that Tristan asks. Now, granted we are talking about a mythology that nobody believes in, but you could easily recreate this exact same conversation using a number of “real” religions that I can think of, and this is exactly the sort of abstract thinking that should be applied to the subject.

I’m back in America. It is as good as I remember.