8 years old going on 14, Kiddy, and a scanner/printer review.

8 years old going on 14 stone that is - a 14 stone 8 year old. To put that into perspective that's heavier then me. Don't worry though GMTV to the rescue. "The trouble is he's 8 he can just go to the fridge and get what he wants" said Fiona; foolish women Mr Expert has the solution "I know some families who lock the fridge". Astounding, such an elegant solution, so refined, so easy; here I was about to suggest not filling the fridge with crappy food, but that just shows why I'm not being interviewed on the sofa. Of course by day seven the family will be so fed up of unlocking the fridge everytime they want some milk etc. they'll just give up, but that's a matter of willpower and the family's fault; not the expert's.

"You can't make children eat vegetables" whitters Fiona. Yes, yes you can; it's called not buying crappy food, but buying vegetables instead. If you've only got a choice of one food-type in your house, oddly enough that's what they'll eat when they get hungry. If you serve vegetables with a meal you don't let the kids down until they've eaten them, unless they claim they're full in which case they don't get anything else now or later.

Have I woken up in a strange parallel universe or something?

Connor's family say he eats "chips with everything", loves curry and snacks on sausage sandwiches, burgers, chocolate biscuits and "junk food all day long while sitting at the computer".

Okay then stop buying chips, stop buying snacks, stop buying junk food. He wants something to chew give him a carrot, give him a banana. What is the matter with you people?

"It seems that it has all turned around and I'm getting blamed for it all but I would like to say, 'cope with a hungry child 24/7 and constantly hassling and nagging you'"

Wow and yet so many other people manage to cope with demanding 8-year old's without them reaching almost twice their age in weight.


As mentioned in an earlier comment I poked my head into Kidderminster on Saturday. I forgot how bad the state of the pavements are, cracked slabs, loose bricks almost all notably at the top end of town away from the snazzy development that is Weavers Wharf. Heading through the Roland Hill Centre I noted that the Café Pacifico was now open for business and, heading to the elevators, I spotted a new music and film store had just opened to the right. No I'm lying it hadn't just opened, when I asked the young lady she told me it had opened a couple of weeks before Christmas. Apparently I wasn't the only one who'd queried that.

It did get a inch in the Shuttle at the end of November and a couple of one-line mentions in other articles (not that they show up using their own search engine), so I've only myself to blame. Damn good range they've got too, I picked up the Blues Brothers collection on DVD (I've had them on tape for too long) and a copy of Eerie Indiana basically a kid's version of the X-Files, but with enough sly references to appeal to adults. They've also got a decent range of animé something sadly lacking in this town. I hope they do well and they'll be on my regular browse rota.

I've taken some shots of phase 5 of Weavers Wharf next to the canal. I've no idea what's moving in there, if anything, I'll upload them shortly (for a given value of shortly ;-) ) heading around them it did take me to 'the area that people forgot' officially titled "The Circus". Other then myself there two guys hanging around and a young lady sitting on the bench, that's busy. If they're reading - hi!


At last I've finally picked up a scanner, went for an Epson RX640 all-in-one in the end. Normally I shy away from all-in-one's as when one component goes you're generally stuffed. In the end though size constraints pushed me towards it. Even so at the moment it's still too large to fit next to my computer until I get another desk and clear everything up a bit. Fortunately it'll work stand-alone too. So, after pulling away a small amount of polystyrene and enough sticky tape to wrap a mummy, I tried scanning and printing some old slides. It suffers from the same problem as with the other scanner in that the automatic settings only work with 35mm film, but looking at the software there's an option to pick a scan size, if that fails I'll try VueScan, and if that fails... ah well such is life.

As it was I used the built-in zoom and crop to pick out the posing people and not the large amounts of hedge/house/half-a-car that my family seem to have an inclination to add to every shot. That was surprisingly easy and intuitive, pick the photo, pick the centre of the crop area, then enlarge it. Get the centre wrong and just go back a step and move it... it remembers the zoom level too and displays it on screen. Sounds silly, but for so many pieces of bad software you'd have to keep going back and forth all the time resetting where you were each time.

The scan is excellent, and using the sample sheets of glossy 6x4 the print was fantastic. One thing I had worried about was the noise, a previous Epson I worked with was a noisy bugger from warm-up to print; this baby purred. Sitting away from it watching the TV I could barely tell when it had started printing nor when it had finished. Warm-up was quick, scan was quick (relative for a slide at high resolution), print was quick. The finished product was slightly tacky to the touch, but not smeary; certainly handleable.

It'll plug directly to my PowerShot and print from there, or from a variety of memory cards. Sadly I ran out of time before I got around to testing shots from my camera, I'll see if I can give it a whirl tonight. Then at some point I'll hook it up to the computer and get those slides in, don't hold your breathe though.

One thing that did bother me (other then the till's attempt to overcharge me by £200), when I bought it I was asked if I had a USB cable to connect it. Fortunately the answer's were a)yes and b)I'm not connecting it; why fortunately? Because it came with one already plugged-in ready.