I had a very long post questioning the very nature of the braintrusts that run Canadian universities, but then I thought, fuck it, if they're stupid enough to fall for this extortion, let them. Obviously they're corrupt. This third party company has some information on someone at the top of those two universities, or people at the top are getting kick backs. So what. Why should we concern our selves with petty corruption, or even grand corruption?

The utilimaker kit is €1194, $1500 in today's trade. If the quality is that much higher, seems like a wise choice, but it's not cheaper than the other kits out there.

Why can't you believe someone from the Eisenhower family would be insane? There's nothing magical about their blood that prevents it. Frankly, their family tree is pretty normal.

not like the tripple-breasted whore of Eroticon Six then?

This is what sticks in my craw about the subject. You're stating as fact that drought will occur, specifically over farm land. When drought has always come and gone, with or without us, farmland or not. What's the difference?

you have plenty, \clicky clicky\ your quota says 0 bytes used

wouldn't it be awesome if the first aliens with which we make contact had hard, bright red exoskeletons, horns on their heads, red glowing eyes and preferred sulfurous drinks? By way of answering my own question, it would be awesome.

I bought one of those from the Kodak company store on ridge road in the 90s, paid something like $400 for it IIRC at employee pricing (as a contractor, though I certainly could be wrong on the purchase price). Two years later, you could get them free with a Barbie doll. I still have it, and those first years with that camera were fun, except for the daily downloading.

they imploded most of their buildings starting around 10 years ago, sold off most of the rest. Heck, almost 1/2 of their downtown HQ complex isn't theirs any more.

There's an indoor sports complex in one of their largest manufacturing plants.

They had a great facility over by RIT, Riverwood, that's rotting and would make an excellent HQ for a dot com but there it sits.

this.

I wouldn't even consider overtime until you complete an initial assessment in terms of hardware warranty, redundancy and replacement costs, licensing mitigation etc. For that, you hardly have to get under the hood.

If they open their budget and agree to realistic (meaning expensive) hardware and software fixes which you'll surely need, stick around, otherwise forget it. Your resume is still warm, keep it in circulation. You don't want to be the lone IT guy in a shop full of illegal copies of server software.

If they magically agree to opening the purse, backup/restore and disaster recovery would be my first priority. Spend time figuring those systems out, implementing automatic tests and work in parallel on a hardware analysis of the entire place, power first, RAID second, database replication a close third. That is, as you review a hosts' backup requirements, and test restores, run through the host and check hardware, ensure it's appropriate to the task at hand, legal, secure, stable and all that. But don't dwell on any particular host too long at first. You don't want to get target fixated on one little detail for more than a few seconds.

Anything without warranty that doesn't have spare parts on hand gets replaced, anything critical without internal hardware redundancy (multiple power supplies on different circuits, RAID etc) gets replaced.

While you're ordering hardware, stage the deliveries so they can be replaced at a reasonable pace, and document as you learn. Start with a simply brain dump of the business reason a host/process exists, then dig down to the details of the changes from a default install of an OS while you're working to replace it.

I would insist on a PFY too.