Agreed. Practicality aside, go for a uniform (company provided if you can swing it) that implies that you are a cut above, rather than two cuts below, the average joe.

If you accept that dressing like a janitor or a sanitation engineer is appropriate then go and do that.

Good help desk staff are professionals and multi-talented, technically adept and great judges of character and students of human nature: who else can placate the irate and fat fingered? Wear a suit, and when you have fixed the problem and are giving them the wind-up speech (what, why, who and now I'm leaving to do important and mysterious stuff) ensure they are sitting at their desk and you are standing, and they're looking up to you.

The natural order of things.

I've just been through this whole charade while replicating an image for a local community centre; Not my field, but I'd been around and had sat through a few deployment meetings in a previous life. It was identical hardware so I was fairly confident I could pull it off. I found Microsoft's documentation on replication and digested it. I ran sysprep and discovered that not only did it completely remove Microsoft's own SteadyState, but it destroyed the customisation I'd spent hours crafting for my end users. There's more to it than that, but that was the guts of it. I restored from backup and moved on...

I did some more research, downloaded NewSID, read the documentation and decided that the scenarios alluded to didn't apply and it was all a lot of messing about for no good reason. In fact, I decided on my own volition that it was all a crock of shit.

I "rolled it out" to use the parlance of the day, and it's fine. Imaging and renaming the computer takes 5 minutes. It works, it prints, it does internet.

I'm marking this one up as a triumph of common sense and practicality tempered by evidential results, over complexity, self-serving bullshit and FUD - vindicated after the event by this article.

HP are good at this: they shipped my DC7900s with Vista installed and a recovery partition, but include an XP downgrade and media in the box. They don't include the backup manager on the install disks though - you have to ring them and beg for it.

If you run the recovery media, it wipes the drive and reformats it without the recovery partition. Your system is restored, but not to the state it was in when you bought it, but to someone else's idea of a good time.

You can boot from the XP media and start to install from it, but you get the BSOD when it tries to write to the SATA drive. If you set it to IDE emulation it installs, but if you set it back to SATA when you've finished (including the latest firmware and drivers) it won't boot. If you nLite it and include the ICH10 drivers it installs fine, but then you can't activate Windows because downgrades don't include a licence to use the software that came in the box: you have to use the recovery media and install all the crapware and then cut it out afterwards.

Boot times were 50% slower than a bare XP install and the subsequent image is 1.5GB larger and god knows what vulnerabilities it still has because of the latent garbage left behind that I got tired of hunting down and killing.

They call these Business PCs as well - I'd hate to see what the consumer line is like...

Our Australian Mt. Stromlo Observatory got a proper roasting in the Canberra fires of 2003. I don't know if they're back up to full speed yet but it was a significant blow to Australian Astronomy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canberra_bushfires_of_2003#Mt_Stromlo

The Greenbird is two vehicles: a land craft and an ice craft, powered only by the wind. ... The project's aim was to break both the land and ice world speed records. On March 26, 2009, the Ecotricity Greenbird set a new world land speed record for wind powered vehicles of 126.1 mph. The team hopes to both better that new record, and continue to work toward breaking the ice record in Winter 2009/10.

Should be interesting to see how it goes on ice. Watch out, IceMice. The publicity should be good for the backer's wind turbine business; vertical urban wind turbines. I'd like some of them, if only to keep the pigeons on their toes.