Well, you know someone out there is either a) bored, b) procrastinating or c) wishing they had gone to art school instead of getting a degree in programming. An anonymous techy describes how he built and justified a Geekmas Tree made of decomissioned six old HP/Compaq servers. He decided to disassemble the hard drives and recycle them into something "neat".
The original goal was to clear up space for new servers and, obviously, each server had a fairly large raid array. So, instead of formatting every hard drive and then disposing them all together with the servers, a funky shimmering disc tree was born. This required loads of patience and plenty of determination. In total there are around 70 old SCSI hard drives, between 9gb and 18gb in size each. They were old-school style, aka nice and chunky. There were also quite a few different hard drive models, which was helpful because they each had different bits that could be used. The final sculpture, dubbed a Christmas tree, is made completely with parts from those hard drives only, except for one $0.39 nut.
I'm just not sure if this is inspiring or I feel bad for the guy with so much time on his hands at work in an economy where productivity is scrutinized.
The disk tree can be seen at:
