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About a week ago I wrote to SouthEastern Railway's Public Affairs Manager, asking him two questions that could be answered with a simple yes or no. I didn't get a yes or no answer to either, and when I pushed for a straight answer to one of them the gentleman in question simply stopped replying to my emails. I'll publish the whole lot, names redacted, after the jump – but in summary:

A) SouthEastern Railway receives a huge subsidy from the Government in order to provide a rail service to the public. In January it failed to provide a proper service, slashing trains for three days, but it will not return an appropriate proportion of said subsidy. Nor will it donate the equivalent amount to charity, which is a shame – the DEC could undoubtedly use a few extra hundred thousand pounds right about now.

B) By cutting its service to an emergency timetable before a flake of snow had fallen, it seems* that SouthEastern ensured that its reliability would be measured against this reduced timetable. As this reliability statistic is used to calculate refunds, this gives it a fighting chance of avoiding the need to refund season ticket holders.

The downside, of course, is that many of its customers get left out in the snow, unable to use the train tickets they paid for. Fans of the absurd will note that the company has since published figures claiming 97.5% (Mainline) and 97.3% (Metro) reliability for the December to January period.

Or, to put it another way:

• The taxpayer pays SouthEastern via a £136m subsidy
• We, the customers, pay SouthEastern for our tickets
• SouthEastern decides not to run a service
• Most customers are left stranded
• Neither the taxpayer or the customer gets a refund

And it's important to note here that, under the National Rail Conditions of Carriage and the Passengers' Charter, this is all perfectly legal.

Evidently some kind of political action is required to ensure that this kind of debacle isn't repeated every time the weather forecast looks unpleasant, so I wrote to a few politicians: my MP, my AM and the Transport Minister.

My AM, Len Duvall, didn't reply – I received a response from his assistant promising a "considered response", but none came. My MP, Bridget Prentice, did contact the company on my behalf and put up with a flurry of CC'd emails from me, for which I'm thankful. As for the Transport Minister, like several people I received a response that in parts bore an uncanny similarity to the documents issued by SouthEastern itself. Nonetheless, it also said:

".. we will be conducting a review of the experience of the service that was provided between the 6th and 8th January 2010. This review will cover all aspects of service provision. Where any areas for improvement are identified, we will ensure that proper action is taken to deliver the required improvement.

Your email has also highlighted the difference between services provided across Sussex and Wessex despite simiar forecasts. We will be seeking understand (sic) from all parties involved the reasons for this. Until this review is complete, I cannot comment on how appropriate Southeastern's response was when compared to the actions taken by other operators."

So there's some hope for the future, and I await the findings of that review with interest. In the meantime, I'm sure our beloved Mayor will sort it out at the Emergency Rail Summit he promised to hold within a few weeks of his election.

* I say "seems to" because when asked whether this is the case the Public Affairs Manager stopped answering my emails. I've waited a week and re-sent the email, but to no avail. If he'd care to get back to me and assure me that this is not the case, I'll be happy to correct this immediately. In the meantime, a parliamentary answer from the 25th of January confirms that, unless SouthEastern should choose otherwise, this is the case.

For the sake of completeness, my full email conversation with SouthEastern is copied after the jump.

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There are few foods as versatile as japanese curry. In Tokyo we saw it served on or with just about everything, but katsu-curry (breaded pork fillet with cury) and curry rice (yes, that's just curry with rice) are staples of good-but-cheap food. If you want to make your own here in the UK, there are three options.

Of course, you can make it from scratch. This would provide both curry and an air of smug satisfaction, but it requires both a recipe and some skill. I have neither. If you're in the same situation you can buy it ready-made in a packet that must then be boiled or microwaved. I've tried these, and they're OK, but there's a definite air of Vesta about the whole business, plus they're very expensive.

There is, fortunately, a third option – and here it is:

This is ready-made curry roux. and you can buy it from just about anywhere that stocks Japanese food. It's cheaper than ready-made, plus you get to choose exactly what goes in the curry, and there's a certain degree of smug satisfaction to gain from doing some of the work yourself. So, what's the downside? Well, er:

Yes, that's the recipe. If you don't speak Japanese, or like me you speak a bit but know hardly any kanji, you're in for a world of translation-related fun. What you need, in fact, is a curry dictionary – and so, courtesy of the ten minutes I spent wrangling with my pocket kenkyusha, here's one I made earlier:

I've pasted this in as an image so it should show on any computer rather than relying on Japanese display fonts. Note that this may not be perfectly correct – I'm guessing that "sarada oil" is vegetable oil, but it seemed to work for me. Any corrections gratefully accepted. And so, on to the recipe.

Armed with that vocabulary and a packet of roux it should be easy to make out the necessary ingredients. For five servings, using Golden Curry roux, the recipe asks for the following:

• 200g meat
• 300g onion
• 100g carrot
• 200g potato
• 1 spoon vegetable oil
• 700ml water
• one packet of roux

Double these for the full ten servings. I had no meat, so I just added more carrots and potato – it's not an exact science. Chop the whole lot, add the oil to a pan, and cook the meat followed by the vegetables (or just chuck the veg in for a bit, in my case):

I cooked it until the onions were softening up nicely, which took a few minutes over a low heat. Next, add the water. The packet calls for 700ml, or 1300 for 10 servings:

The packet, if I'm reading it correctly, says to simmer for 10 minutes, or 20 if making ten servings. I found that about 15 minutes were needed to cook the potato chunks. Anyhow, after ten to fifteen minutes, it's time to break out the curry. Here's what's in the box:

If making ten servings we'd use both, but for five only one is needed. Open it up and chuck the incredibly attractive contents into the pan:

Obviously it's less than a feast for the eyes at this stage. Stir gently for a few minutes, though, and as if by magic:

Curry! Stir it for a few mintues more (be warned, it'll stick and burn given the chance), then serve on rice, katsu, or just about anything else:

Brown, glutinous, chunky, probably packed with MSG and yet strangely delicious. Enjoy.

Because this is what happens to your brain when you spend an entire week at home playing Assassin's Creed 2 and hugging cats.

Ah, Ebay. I've used it to buy and sell all kinds of low-value crap (old video games, more old video games, old camera lenses and so on) and all with no problems, but I suppose that had to come to an end at some point. But in any case, should something go wrong with an Ebay transaction, you're protected by Paypal and its Protection for Buyers, right? Well, maybe – but in some cases it's as useful as a chocolate teapot (those are probably available on Ebay, too). Anyhow, let me explain.

I needed, for various dull reasons, a component video cable for the Xbox 360. Amazon didn't have any to send out from its warehouse, so I took a look on ebay – and there I found this veritable bargain (clicky for a larger, legible version):

Note the picture of the Microsoft leads in their little plastic box, and the wonderful description: "don't risk buying cheap copies on ebay buy here and get the real thing". So, what showed up in the post? Clue: not "the real thing".

That's "the real thing", complete with HMV pricetag, on the right, and the pile of cheap knocked-off crap that arrived from my ebay friend on the left. Note that not only is it not the one advertised, but that it's a cheap and nasty fake – and also that the people who made it copied the wrong packaging, so it claims to be a VGA cable (oops). What you probably can't see from here is that the plugs themselves are crummy with scratched connectors. Yay for high quality.

So, I paid £6 or so for this. I'm not hugely bothered by losing £6, and nor am I bothered by someone selling knocked-off Xbox cables – but, had I wanted a cheap alternative, I could have bought one from any of the Ebay sellers who label these (cheap) goods properly and honestly. I wanted the real thing, chose a seller offering it at a good price, and paid up. Now I'd like my money back.

And so, to Ebay. I looked for an option to complain to the seller, but there is none – instead I had to open a dispute with Paypal. I filled in the form, describing the product as a fake item and "not as described", and submitted it. I expected Paypal to contact the seller, but instead I got a message saying that he was unavailable so the "disupute" had been escalated to a "claim". Splendid. At no point was I asked for proof of what had gone wrong.

So far so slightly odd. But then, a few days later, another email arrives from Paypal:

You may be eligible for a refund on this PayPal transaction.

To qualify for a refund, return the purchased item to the seller in the same condition you received it. Please do this within ten calendar days of receiving this email.

The amount of your refund is based on our Buyer Protection programs and we may not be able to repay the full amount of your transaction. Please review the Buyer Protection programs in our User Agreement before posting the item back to the seller.

You are responsible for all postage and packing costs of returning the merchandise.

So, in order to possibly get a refund of £6 or so, I'll have to pay £5 to send the item back (via registered, insured post just in case it should "mysteriously" fail to arrive with the ebay seller, or rather go straight in his bin). And I don't get that £5 back. The logical thing to do in cases like this is, of course, not to throw good money after bad – which will require me to cancel my claim, leaving the buyer to go on and con others the same way.

So, there you have it: for low value goods, or anything that'll cost a lot to transport relative to their initial cost, Buyer Protection is worthless. The seller, with his garage full of cheap crap, gets to keep selling it to people who think they're getting a proper licensed product. Paypal gets to carry on taking a cut of each payment to the dodgy seller. And the buyers? We get ripped off, write off the loss then go to HMV. Hurrah.

Update: as I said above, the sensible thing to do if you get ripped off in a situation like this is not to throw good money after bad. When it came to actually dropping my Paypal claim, however, I couldn't do it. So, despite it being the financially stupid move, I posted the cable back at the cost of a few quid – and, hurrah, got a refund. Net result: the lying seller doesn't get to keep my money, but the Royal Mail does. Meh.

By way of an introduction, here's a very incomplete list of things I like:

• Cats
• Ramen

Armed with this information, you can probably see why a cartoon series called Neko Ramen (noodle-soup-cat – often transliterated to 'neko rahmen', with an 'h', for some reason) appeals to me. And it is quite wonderful. Here's episode one, courtesy of a website that allows embedding – the subtitles are a bit crap, but you get the idea:

Somewhere in deepest darkest Greenwich, out near the Millenium Dome, lies an Odeon multiplex cinema. Formerly a Filmworks, it's the shape of a huge bucket and holds 18 screens including, since December, an IMAX theatre.

How, I wondered, can you cram an IMAX screen into an existing cinema without ripping a good half-dozen other screens out? The answer is that, as it turns out, you don't. You stick a smaller screen in, slap a big IMAX badge on the outside and a few extra quid on each ticket.

Look on the web for information on the Greenwich IMAX and you'll find that IMAX has been outfitting cinemas with a system completely different to its traditional "build a screen the size of Jupiter and project 70mm film on it" setup for some time. Some people are very angry with the fact that the new, identically named, IMAX system is obviously inferior to the original as it uses a far smaller screen and relatively low-spec projectors (two 2K, rather than 4K, models). You'll also find an Odeon website blathering about "floor to ceiling screens" and "theatre geometry", while a local newspaper report shows four kids with an oversized ticket and the rather grainy picture of the screen I've reproduced above.

Nothing on the web, though, could tell me what I needed to know: should we pick an IMAX showing of the film (conforming entirely to stereotype, we wanted to see Star Trek) at Greenwich or the slightly cheaper 35mm screening next door? So, dear Google indexing robots and those who may be searching for the same information, here's my two cents.

The IMAX screen (9) is, appropriately, one of the biggest – almost 240 seats in three banks. Most of the central bank are "premier" seats that cost extra. We were on the aisle on a side bank about two thirds of the way up, and the view was fine – the rake's quite steep, so you can see clearly over those in front. The screen itself is nowhere near IMAX size, but large enough for the auditorium and, yes, almost floor to ceiling, while the sound system is impressive if terrifyingly loud. The image in our showing was brilliant for roughly two hours of the film, but marred by annoying blue stripes for about two minutes near the start – whatever caused these, they were fortunately banished.

So, is this new, smaller IMAX a con? Possibly – it's certainly confusing. Is it worth a fiver per ticket if you know it's not proper IMAX, though? I'd say so: short glitch aside, the picture is better than most that I've seen in UK multiplexes lately, so you're paying a bit more for a high quality digital screening. And, as an added bonus, there's very little pre-film advertising to suffer through – just a few IMAX idents and two of the dumbest trailers I've ever seen (Transformers 2 and, honestly, GI Joe The Movie). Go, gawk, enjoy – just don't cough up any more for the Premier seats.

Oh, and Star Trek is really rather good. Thanks for asking.

I've been scrawling that over and over again, lately.

A few years ago, and about five years after finishing my degree, I decided that I wanted to learn something again. I figured a language would be more useful than anything else and working in technology there were only really two useful choices: some sort of Chinese, most likely Mandarin, and Japanese. Knowing nothing much about China or Chinese culture, and being an avid consumer of Japanese books (a lot of Haruki Murakami, at the time) and video games (yes, I am a walking stereotype) I picked the latter. I signed up for a one year "Beginner's Japanese" course at SOAS with two hours of tuition per week.

I followed the course for a year, and it taught me a decent amount of (largely business-like) Japanese, along with how to read and write hiragana and katakana – the two alphabet-like kana scripts, rather than the pictographic kanji. I also learned a few other things, though, such as that I couldn't really stretch to £300-plus-per-term courses on my salary at the time and that after working an eight hour day in the office my brain is pretty much incapable of writing English, let alone any other language. So, I passed the first year and then dropped out. Yay me.

I figured I'd continue to study on my own, but this never really happened. For two reasons, I suppose: a lack of willpower and a problem with textbooks. SOAS uses a course called Minna no Nihongo, which is largely concerned with business situations and very focused on instruction in Japanese only – great with a teacher, but on your own it's hard to work out which audio clips or exercises are which, let alone what you're meant to be listening for or writing. So, that was pretty much the end of my experiment with Japanese. Until last week.

Last week Helen and I decided that, having not had a long holiday for three years, it was time to take more than two days away from work. I was briefed to look for relaxing beach holidays. I found myself looking at flights to Tokyo. Helen liked the idea. We're going later this summer. Which leaves me a month or two to pick up the language again. No pressure.

And, pleasantly, it's been going surprisingly well. I was amazed to find that most hiragana characters had stuck somewhere in the back of my brain, and after a few days of practicing on the train I can now read and write both it and katakana again. I've also picked up a different textbook – Genki, which is apparently more modern, easier for English-speakers and less business-focused – to replace Minna no Nihongo, and I've found some PC-based flashcards that are quite good. And unlike the final months of my last course, where I felt like the daft kid at the back of the class who hadn't done his homework (usually on press week), I'm enjoying the whole process of learning again.

Of course, despite all this I'll probably get to Tokyo and find that I can't read, comprehend or say anything of use. But who knows – it's worth a try.

I know, I know – this has been going around the internets. But still: I shall mostly be spending my weekend making, and consuming, one of these:

.. a bacon cheeseburger wrapped in a Krispy Kreme donut. Apparently it's called a "Luther Burger", and the above photo was taken in the Google cafeteria.

Oh, and since I'm just posting shit off the internet these days, clicky here.

Further to my bitter ramblings about the way that every news event is followed by crap articles explaining how Twitter saved the day, yesterday evening a plane ditched in the Hudson river. Today, with crushing predictability, we get the Twangles – first from The Guardian (check out the headline) then from the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones, who amazingly found out about the crash at 21.45 thanks to the wonder of microblogging.

Great. Brilliant. Except that I found out a good hour earlier while waiting for a DLR train at Limehouse because it was already making the US news websites (picked it up on Gawker, followed it to MSNBC). Perhaps I should cough up a six hundred word article on this amazing new way to distribute news – you know, "news stories". They're a bit like tweets, but long enough to contain all the pertinent facts, correctly spelled and actually verified. Must. Inform. World.

New Year's Eve was all going terribly well until, at about 7pm, the fridge (a Samsung RL33SBSW, for anyone Googling) started making an extremely loud mechanical buzzing sound. We stood and watched it for a minute or so, as if hoping that it'd rethink its timing and resume working, but the only change was four of its five lights beginning to blink in an obstinate "No, I'm really breaking down NOW" kind of way.

As you can see above, the manual was less than helpful. Samsung's help line staff had, of course, gone home for the bank holiday barely an hour earlier. Perfect timing.

We resorted to that time honoured method of domestic appliance troubleshooting: Google. Nothing. It turns out that at least three other people have had the same problem and reported it online, but nobody followed up with a cause or solution. By 8pm, and with no real idea what to do, the screwdrivers came out. We managed to fix a second, completely unrelated, fault that we were previously unaware of, but couldn't even get to the area where the problem seems to lie. At 9pm, more Googling, and we found a forum dedicated to broken fridges. Hooray. We posted a message and got a suggested solution less than an hour later on New Year's Eve. It's hard to work out what we would have done without access to the internet – hit the fridge with a rock, maybe.

So now the broken fridge is empty and slowly warming up, and we're bloated from eating everything of value in the freezer. I'll add more details below if we do actually manage to fix it, temporarily or otherwise. Oh, and after 10pm the New Year went much better: we watched a rather sweet Korean film about a woman who thinks she's a robot, while the fridge buzzed angrily away in the background, slowly freezing all its contents solid. Ah, domestic bliss.

–

Update – and here's how we fixed it, for the moment at least, with the help of the forum linked above. Disclaimer: I am not an engineer. I am, regularly, an idiot. I take no responsibility if, having used these instructions, your fridge becomes too hot / too cold / a ball of flame / vertically mobile. You might try this is your problem includes: four flashing lights, very loud buzzing noise from within the freezer compartment, contents of fridge getting frozen solid. If you have another problem, look elsewhere.

Step 1: Eat contents of fridge and freezer, then turn it off for 24 hours.

Step 2: Turn it back on. The problem may be solved* – if so, congratulations. If not, turn it back off and move on to Step 3.

Step 3: Take out the freezer baskets. You'll see a plastic plate on the back held on with four Philips screws – remove these, then remove the plate. It's held on with plastic clips at the sides, so you'll need to give it a bit of a tug, starting with the bottom then moving up until it's removed.

Step 4: Look in the top left corner of the area behind the cover. It should look like this:

Note the flap door thing in the top left. This is motorised, and should spin to regulate the flow of cold air into the fridge and freezer. Ours was jammed open with a bit of insulation foam that had fallen from the join above – the horrible buzzing was its motor attempting to turn the flap and failing.

Step 5 – if your spinny flap thing is jammed with something, unjam it. Doing this fixed our fridge, so it may well fix yours. If it's not jammed, then the problem must lie elsewhere – bad luck.

Step 6 – clip then screw the cover back on, turn the fridge on, cross fingers for luck. I turned the fridge back on before replacing the cover, and the flap span slowly around a few times as if testing itself before settling in the position shown above. Bear in mind that, should you do this, the electrical wires in the fridge will be live so don't touch anything.

* I think this 24 hour period solves the problem if the flap is iced shut rather than jammed on something.