(no subject)

[camwyn]

BartPE is a godsend when one of your computers has a hard drive failure. It truly is. Pity I can't get network support to work yet, but it's done a far better job at scandisking that bastard into submission than Windows Recovery Console ever did.

Wonder if I can get it to recognize a USB CD burner. If so, great. If not, I'm calling our consultants and asking for our portable hard drive back so I can schlep the remaining material off this computer and onto a working disk. But BartPE works and is free, and the hard drive wouldn't be any use to me without the work I've been able to do with BartPE, so- am happy.

In other news, they're in the process of decorating the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree. Am I the only one who finds this wrong? They cut down a tree of immense age every year so it'll temporarily be pretty, then get rid of it somewhere. I'm all for Christmas and Yule symbols, but it seems wrong to hack down a tree that's survived more than any of the guys with chainsaws ever have, just to be pretty for people to gawk at.

Comments

Re: Yule Tree

[camwyn]

I've been to tree farms before; my parents and sister and I have cut a tree for the house several years in the past. (These days they buy their trees from the local Jaycees and let the money go to social service programmes.) Here, though... Last year the Rockefeller Center tree was from a backyard in Wayne, New Jersey. Not a farm. It wasn't planted with the intent of being cut down to serve as a symbol; it just grew there, got noticed when it was fifty, and got bought and cut and put up in New York City.

It's one thing for a tree that was planted and cultivated with the intent of being what amounts to the city's Yule symbol to be cut down. It's another entirely for a tree that was just doing what trees do to be taken.

Re: Yule Tree

[kelathefinn.livejournal.com]

I understand that the city is offered the tree from several different sources...the whole process is very interesting. I hear what you are saying, but I still think that the tree is very carefully selected, by foresters who are hopefully responsible ecologists (all the foresters of my acquaintance, i.e. almost all the men of my acquaintance, ARE ecologically responsible...).