If she is interested in learning programming, there's several courses on Khan Academy that do basic Java/Javascript that are age appropriate. My 9 year old had never shown any prior interest in learning how to do anything beyond games and Youtube on the computer, but I set her up on KA one afternoon and she spent about 30 minutes figuring out how to draw boxes on the screen to finish the requirements, then spent another hour and a half drawing things on the screen with Javascript. Access is free, and has other things she might be interested in as well.

I was at a hotel chain about 10 years ago that was using magstripe cards for room entry. Checked in, walked up to my room, swiped my card, and got no green light. Tried it again, no light. Just out of curiosity, I tried the handle and the door opened. Called down to the front desk to let them know my card wasn't working right, and they sent a maintenance guy up to fix it. The fix, a torx screwdriver and 4 AA batteries. When the batteries went dead, the door defaulted to open. With insecurity by default, what's to stop someone from walking up to a door with a small power screwdriver, pulling a battery, and walking into your room in about the same time as it takes you to swipe a card and get in?

Wrong. Redhat's first release was October 1994. RPM didn't come along until 1997. Debian's first release was August 1993. Their history doesn't indicate the date that the first release of dpkg was unleashed, but it was prior to 1.1, which was in June 1996. apt is a more recent addition, dselect was the package management tool of choice prior to that, and was around since 0.93R6 in November 1995.
https://www.debian.org/doc/man...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

I've been a Debian user since sometime in 1996, was a RH user from 3.0.3 until around the 6.X days, and was a Slackware user before that (back in the pre-kernel 1.0 days when a distro was 50+ floppies for a full install)

From the sound of the post, this sounds more like a build lab rather than a server room/data center. Temporary equipment, unboxed long enough to configure/burn-in, then put back in the box and shipped out to another location for production. The needs of this kind of space are drastically different than a production data center.

Your goals here are make it quick and easy to get stuff out of the box, configured, and back out the door as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Things I'd do to start:
If doing racks, consider shelves so you can slide equipment in and out quickly. Some racks will let you do shelves that mount to the sides rather than taking up 1U for a shelf, these may let you get more density in the rack and need fewer racks.
If doing shelves, don't stack equipment, try to put it like books on end, makes it a lot easier to get one piece out without moving a bunch of others.
Plenty of power cords/outlets where you need it, make sure if everything isn't a C13 that you account for this. Newer switches are starting to use C15s or C19s for larger equipment. Make sure you have a large enough UPS to handle startup current for all these devices. Constantly turning up/down equipment is hell on your power feeds, good clean UPS power is important.
Patch cables wired in and velcro'ed off to the rack where you need them, and run extras. That way if you have a suspected bad cable or a broken end you aren't worrying about replacing it right away to get the equipment out the door.
Terminal servers are a godsend in an environment like that. Configure them so you know that TS1, port 1 is the top (or bottom) device in the rack. Keep them in order or you'll be tearing your hair out why the wrong device just rebooted.
As someone else mentioned, USB barcode scanners if you have to do any kind of inventory tracking is a GREAT tool to have.
Separate but adjacent boxing/unboxing room with a sturdy table. And a sturdy cart to move equipment back and forth between them. You want to keep all the cardboard and styrofoam out of the equipment config area.

What single book are you the most proud of, and see as your best work? Or which one have you had the most people tell you was _the_ book they use/recommend the most?

Simple. The technical people at Comcast are highly skilled intelligent people. They aren't senior level techs at one of the largest ISPs in the world by being idiots. The legal department on the other hand is staffed by money-sucking weasels (like all legal departments are) who are supporting stupidity in legislation without bothering to talk to their highly skilled technical people about whether this braindead legislation is even technically POSSIBLE to implement. The technical people no doubt KNOW that SOPA is impossible with DNSSEC. Hence they're encouraging everyone to move to DNSSEC as quickly as possible, so in the event that Congress screws up and passes this abortion of a bill at the behest of the large content providers and intellectual property bandits, they'll find out that it doesn't work on large portions of the Internet, thus pissing off their constituents even more, and causing a large shift in political goodwill towards their opponents.

Has anybody suggested asking the current political candidates their views on SOPA? If you live in the US, and your Congressperson is listed as a Co-sponsor of the bill, or listed as an opponent of the bill, have you contacted them to voice your opinion? Votes are all that matters to politicians. A few hundred calls/emails to their office telling them that this is a flawed bill, and it WILL result in your vote going to their opponent can quickly change their minds on what matters to them.

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d112:HR03261:@@@P
That's the current list of SOPA co-sponsors.

Which government agency is the worst to get information from?

http://www.gutenberg.org/ Pick up a wide variety of classic literature for free. Or visit your local public library and ask the librarians there to help you find the section which fits your interests. Historical non-fiction, sci-fi/fantasy, or technology/military based fiction are prevalent out there. You'd probably get more recommendations if you had said what genres you wanted to read. Things like Terry Pratchett, Tom Clancy, Dale Brown or biographies of famous people are usually my choices for reading on a trip. The one advantage of picking them up in dead-tree format is you can read them while you're sitting for an hour waiting to taxi, when MP3 players and iPad/Kindles aren't allowed to be on. The downside to that is they're heavier to carry around with you.

Document everything you can.
Backup configs, make sure you save them frequently when things are working.
Get a good network management/monitoring package which uses SNMP to monitor the equipment.
Take as many classes and training sessions as you can.
Purchase vendor support for equipment. Cisco TAC is invaluable when the excrement hits the oscillating device. When the network is down, and the boss comes into the server room to ask when it's back up, it's much more comforting to hear that the vendor is helping you investigate the issue than to hear you have no idea what the problem is or when it might be fixed.
Build a lab to test/learn new protocols/ways of doing things. Have a couple servers in there, as well as the same type or smaller versions within the same family. If you're running Cisco 3945 routers in production, a lab with 1720s running 10 year old code doesn't help you troubleshoot production issues or test code upgrades.
A good podcast which covers CCNA/CCNP level topics with examples:
http://www.ciscohandsontraining.com/
How to backup your devices:
http://www.shrubbery.net/rancid/
Netdisco, good tool for network discovery and host tracking
http://www.netdisco.org/
Join and read network mailing lists. NANOG, Cisco-NSP, Juniper-NSP are a good place to start. http://puck.nether.net/mailman/listinfo/ to subscribe to several of those.
Beyond that, good luck. Speaking as someone who has been doing systems/network administration for close to 15 years, you will learn something new every day. If you don't, you're not trying hard enough.

Show of hands, who else did a whois on those IPs and noticed they're registered to Microsoft in Ireland and Great Britain? I get enough crap from Microsoft, why would I want to let more in?

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/ios/12_1/12_1xm/feature/guide/ftwrlsmc.html http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/wireless/ps2360/prod_installation_guide09186a00800d9d79.html AKA known as the Cisco WT2700 Wireless system. Which was end-of-lifed almost 3.5 years ago, so I wouldn't see why anybody would be putting in one of these systems anymore.