Minutes of Fame Postponed

I received an e-mail late Friday informing me that the story they did about me has been postponed until Monday. This is the first time I've been on-line since late Friday morning, or else I would have posted an update sooner.

Why Foam Packing Peanuts and VCRs Should Never Mix

Just before BayCon, Lisa had me purchase on eBay a couple of Panasonic AG-5700 professional editing VCRs. They arrived just before she headed for California. She called me and in a despairing tone informed me that the seller had simply put them in a box and dumped foam packing peanuts around them, and that the packing peanuts had gotten into the VCR's mechanism. I corresponded with the seller, and they agreed that we could open them up and try to extract the peanuts ourselves and that they'd take the units back if the peanuts had damaged the units internally.

We decided to wait until I had the camera up in Oregon with Lisa so we could document everything we had done, just in case there were any questions.

( Photos of Operation Nuts to Panasonic )

Somewhat to our astonishment, after carefully cleaning all of the packing peanuts out of the machines, they both worked properly, playing and recording tapes just fine. What a relief!

But here's a lesson if you should ever have to ship a VCR: Never use packing peanuts. This isn't even the first time something like this has happened to us. There are other packing materials that will protect your goods without trying to worm their way inside of every nook and cranny of sensitive electronic equipment.