So I learned from the news today, that China's latest attempt to protect people from the evils of the Internet - evils such as free speech - failed for the time being.

They had this brilliant piece of software called "Green Dam" and, they said, it would stop pornography and pornographic images. A very intelligent piece of software, apparently. It would read text and block all rude content, and it would scan images and stop all pornographic images.

Well, sort of.

How it works is that it would scan the image pixel by pixel and work out how many of the pixels were flesh-coloured. If the flesh-coloured pixels exceeded a certain percentage then the image, quite clearly, is pornographic.

So that would immediately kill any photographs of wounds and symptoms which were being shared for medical research then.

Even better than that, the software is very picky about it's definition of "flesh coloured" - only white-skinned flesh is pornographic apparently.

And then, topping all that, is the filtering out of rude words. Geeks like me know it as "The Scunthorpe Syndrome". You'll like this.

Computers are not intelligent - all they can do is add things up really fast. You tell them to look out for certain patterns in emails and stuff and they'll do a brilliant job of finding them.

So, you tell the software to filter out words like:

f**k
c**t

and so on.

Then, all of a sudden, you wonder why every computer on the Internet refuses to handle anything from Scunthorpe. To you and I, Scunthorpe is obviously not pornographic - and if you've ever been there then there's nothing to get excited about. But to a computer, it sees the letter 'S', then it sees a banned word, followed by the characters 'horpe'.

A friend of mine recently told me about a work trip to India he had made, and some of the fantastic blocking of websites that went on there. You could bring up the BBC News Home Page and navigate anywhere - but anything with the word "cricket" in it was instantly blocked. Apparently, if it were not blocked, then nobody in India would do any work because they'd all be reading the cricket scores. All of our call centres would shut down, nobody would be able to renew their car insurance, and the earth would stop spinning on its axis.

But I have a more pressing problem. I have two competing pressures.

One is the unstoppable ticking of time - it is 60 days until Dawn to Dusk and counting. The other is that I have a 2-stroke in a bit of a state of disrepair, due to all of the times I've used her for trail riding and stuff. She is, without doubt, the weapon of choice for Dawn to Dusk and we will be ready.

Four apples.

What?

If I have six apples, and give two of them to you, what do I have left?

Oh, OK, so time flows in that direction in your universe does it?

My point is that why is it that time has to flow in a single direction?

Martin is full of advice on what Geronimo! needs doing, but somewhat less full of offers to help me achieve this. His view is that if I can't do this on my own by now then I truly am a hopeless case.

Geronimo! is up at Martin's, where she has been since we went playing in Wales. Not having a bike in the house has caused my attention to drift and wander and think about things other than racing - having steel plates surgically removed from my insides has also helped.

But, as I recover, I realise that not having a bike in the house is not a good thing. We have a race - the biggest race in the UK - coming up and we both need to be ready. Some fettling and frobbing and TLC is required. There are hand guards and sprockets and chains and levers and exhausts to sort out. There are also - god forbid I should forget them - my starting stilts which I need to organise.

And I only have 1,440 hours in which to do it - as well as get a couple of races in beforehand to get myself fit again after being out due to injury.

Martin and I are doing it as a 2-man team this year. Part of me is flattered that I did not make such a bad showing of myself last time that he is willing to ride with me again, and part of me is thinking that he knows that if we are in the same team then it prevents me from beating him. He knows this is coming - he is an old man, and his powers are weak.

F reud would undoubtedly have something to say about this next bit. He'd probably conclude that I had some latent hostility towards Martin - hence the carefully chosen words, born out of a competitiveness with my Father for my Mother's attention.

U sually, Freud put everything down to this - the constant battle between son v Father for the attention of Mother, and the constant battle between daughter and Mother for the attention of Daddy.

C an that really be true? Is it really that we have these things hard wired into us as children, and that they plague all of our relationships through our adult lives?

K nowing the answer to this is something that clever people have been working on for the hundred years since Freud. Inbetween pschoanlysing the minutest of details about us, and feeding us all kinds of medications, they have been given PhDs and Nobel Prizes on the back of what they have "discovered" about weirdos like me.

I f you think, for a second, that mental illness didn't exist until one of these clever people wrote a scientific paper about it and gave it a name, then it becomes weirder still. When you consider that there is no medical test that can be performed to say whether or not somebody is mentally ill, you have to question the wisdom of their science.

N ow, I am not saying that their science is wrong. I'm just saying that their science isn't like normal medical science - you give blood, its analysed, its diagnosed. This is not the case with mental diagnoses - these are diagnoses of judgement and gut feel.

G ut feel, in and of itself, is a good thing - I have spoken about this in the past. But applying gut feel to a medical diagnosis that can affect somebody's insurability and their liberty for the rest of their lives is probably something which should be a bit more scientific and evidential don't you think?

B ut, that said, I came here to talk about the Scunthorpe Syndrome.

A ll that computers can do is scan patterns, and then slavlishly follow the decisions that their operator and programmer have told them.

S ince the computers themselves cannot think, they cannot tell the difference between an innocent "Scunthorpe" and a less-innocent "not Scunthorpe".

T he problem of how to get computers to protect us from evil is not a new one, and many many things have been tried.

A nd, at the same time, these computers keep failing in their task.

R eally, you think that after so many years of trying, we'd be able to get it right by now.

D id you see the spaces after the first letter in the above 14 paragraphs? No Scunthorpe computer in the world would spot it - but you did.

And, no. Whatever Freud may have to say, it is not aimed at Martin. Phil, ye of mighty girth and length and rigidity of penis, that was my gift to you.

I have been magnanimous. I have been pragmatic. I have given co-operation and helpfulness. I had feared that these would be interpreted for weakness and I had hoped that I was wrong. I was right, and hate myself for it. I feel ashamed that I tried to be reasonable, since the only language this guy understands is being a "Scunthorpe".

Aw well, we tried to do this the easy way, without anybody losing too much face. Let's try a different approach - let's kill eachother.

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I mentioned to a friend of mine about a conference I one attended, and he fell of his chair. Such things should not be allowed, he protested.

I can assure you, they are real.

Way back when, back in the day, I used to work for a Company who wrote compilers (complicated computer stuff). I was selected to attend a particular conference whose job it was to discuss and agree a particular standard about a particular thing. I was armed with a single voting card and an expenses account - what more could you possibly ask for?

You've all seen the political conferences right? Leader of the Party gets up and speaks, lots of clapping, then everybody votes on what he says. Majority carries the day.

Well, it was sort of like that.

Except that there were an awful lot of sandal-wearing beardie professor types - this was a conference about computer standards. And there was a real buzz going on too - the kind of thing that would get The Sun in a bit of a headline tizz:

"Punctuation? Stick it up your Colon!"

and stuff like that.

The hot topic of the day was semicolons - those little things that look like a comma underneath a dot - right next to the 'L' key on your computer.

I mean, puh-lease. All of us there - all 2,000 of us, knew that a semicolon was used to tell a computer that "this is the end of the line. Everything that follows is a new line".

A thought just occurred to me - women use semicolons a lot:

"Everything I say ends with a semicolon. A semicolon indicates the end of the argument. Anything you say is the start of a new argument".

Anyway, the semicolon.

A professor from Edinburgh University - hyper-intelligent man who put his trousers on back to front, name of Atholl Hay, had asked this most heinous of questions:

"If there are two semicolons side by side, do we ignore them, or do we generate an error message?"

You make not want to believe it, but it was discussions like this that built Facebook and Twitter and all of that jazz.

Throughout the conference, the profs lobbied and haggled and bullied to try to carry the votes. The smarter professors had invited pretty young girls from their computer science courses - because everybody knows that no geek in the world can say no to a WonderBra.

Professors got tanked up on Lager, or creme-de-menthe or whatever it is that professors drink, and then got all proper hot-headed and wanting to punch eachother's lights out.

Over a semicolon. All these nubile young ladies in tight t-shirts wandering about, and the professors are offering to take eachother outside over a fucking semicolon.

Those poor, poor, girls. They turned up at the conference feeling all attractive and eye-candy, and ended up being completely ignored for the sake of a bit of punctuation. I am sure that some of them are in therapy still.

But here's the best bit.

The conference had a hung vote. Instead of dictating one way or the other, the conference dictated that "interpretation of two simulataneous semicolons will be implementation dependent".

Which, in normal language, means "we don't care. You guys fight it out amongst yourselves, whilst we spike the young ladies drinks with Rohypnol".

To this day, it is a matter of religion and dogma how to treat two simultaneous semicolons, and I was there.

And, to my eternal shame, I was there arguing with the profs. If I knew then what I know now, I'd have been discussing the matter with the young ladies in the tight t-shirts.

You live, you learn.

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I was originally planned to go riding today with a giant of a man.

I got my stitches out yesterday, and the old shoulder is not exactly healing as well as we had hoped, so I had to embarassingly and annoyingly bail on todays rideout at the last minute. More importantly than that, I had to let people down, and I truly truly regret this.

Instead, I spent the day hunting.

All of you have used the term "bug" when describing software. When something doesn't work right, then it's a a "bug". Getting bugs out of software is called "debugging". Ever wonder where that came from?

In the 50's, back when computers were the size of football pitches and worked using valves, a bunch of engineers were using one of these behemoths to add up 2 + 2, and they kept getting 5. These boffins couldn't understand it and went hunting for the problem.

The problem turned out to be an insect, which had crawled its way into one of the valves and shorted it out. They removed the insect and, eventually, 2 + 2 equalled 4.

Given that this was in America, and in America they refer to insects as "bugs", the engineers report said that the reason for the wrong answer was because there was a "bug" in the computer. The name has stuck for 60 years.

So today I was hunting bugs, one particularly nasty one too. It was lurking somwhere in 700,000 lines of code which, through the course of today, becae 100,000, then 10,000, then 1,000 and - eventually - 64 lines of code.

The 80:20 rule applies here - I spent 20% of my time narrowing this down to 64 lines, and then 80% of my time hunting it.

It was a minx. It knew where to hide. It knew how to camoflauge itself. For the geeks amongst you, 'C' is a cruel mistress. If you do not have a clue what that means, then your life truly is better off.

I spent hours. My brows were furrowed. At several points, I really thought that today was the day they invented the computer problem I could not nail.

Then I found it, playing dead amongst some undergrowth and pretending to be a discarded coca-cola can. Today was not the day.

But today was the day when I had to let people down because I was physically not capable of riding a bike.

And, for that, I feel like shit.

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