Having a bad few days on the web. We'd tried our carpet-monkey on loads of cartoon movies: Cars, Monsters Inc., The Little Mermaid. She couldn't care less, all she wants to do is climb up the side of the stool I'm trying to work on and scream at me. It's doing nothing for my productivity. Jess brought home one of Malaysia's finest pirated VCDs, Barney's Sense-sational Day. My heart dropped. Oh no! My baby can't watch that mush! Fortunately, it wouldn't play on either of the two workstations on my desk. Unfortunately, after a few insertions, it played on Jess' old PC. It failed again after 10 minutes, but Emily was transfixed from beginning to IO error, and every time we started it again.

Fantastic! All we need to do is to get the geezer with the eye patch at the Black Pearl Multimedia Store to swap it for a good copy... Jess has that look on her face. I think it means something like "caveat emptor". Well, I wouldn't have agreed to her buying pirated videos if she'd told me beforehand anyway. If a crime's to be committed, it seems a finer thing to do it yourself than to pay someone else to do it for you. Also, we've got Streamyx's unlimited broadband package. Ho ho me lads! The booty's ours for the taking! A quick search later, and it's obvious lots of people must have children of a similar age with similar tastes. They can't be watching that stuff themselves, surely?

So I selected a few choice titles. And then I waited. And waited. Why is nothing downloading? Why is no-one uploading from me? There are some relatively popular titles sitting on my hard disk, waiting for 'sharers', my upload rate is often as high as my download rate, but now... nothing.

Days have passed. Today, a single download session started. From a Malaysian IP address. Hmmm. I suspect I'm no longer sharing files with the Internet. It's a common suspicion - try googling "streamyx p2p". It's a public holiday today, but I must try phoning TM tomorrow. Unlimited should mean exactly that. Is there a trading standards authority here?

I'm new here, aren't I?