I went through all the slides, and my grin kept getting bigger. First things first.

- Spock not a superhero? You got that wrong, I'm afraid. The noble genius died selflessly for his crew and his ship, came back to life through an accident of super-science, and traveled through time in a spacecraft of his own design to save his home planet from total annihilation. Super hero. Done. Go ahead, someone convince me I'm wrong. And don't try to tell me the Abrams flick wasn't an epic win, because it just was. Awesome.

- Okay, now a little more serious. Sysadmins work hard. That's IT. That's what we do. Computer systems don't break on convenient schedules. Seems like every year during the holidays, I wonder what's going to interrupt (a) sleep or (b) stuffing some delicious-and-unusual-because-it's-the-holidays morsel of food into my face. Plus, those pesky users are so insistent on using their systems during the working hours, which leaves the off-hours for the sysadmin crew to lurk about in the dark, doing upgrades, migrating data, replacing the broken bits, and just generally doing what needs to be done to make the place run. So yeah. Hard works, long-ish hours, easily more than 40. Not surprised by that stat.

- I took from a few of the questions that praise is nice, but that sysadmins are more about solving the problems. I identify with that. If no one knows my name but my boss, and he's happy? Than that's good enough for me. Sure, I like to know I'm doing a good job and that I'm appreciated, but I get a bigger kick out of fixing stuff that's borked, and maybe doing something clever that will allow IT services to keep soldiering on the next time it's borked. I was that kid who took everything part (and sometimes put it back together again), and built all sorts of things with Lego, Tinkertoys, Bristle Blocks (anyone remember those?), and Robotix, Building things, solving problems - it all goes together. We like to see stuff work; we can see it in our heads. We know how stuff is supposed to go, and we can come up with ways to make it do what it should when it's not behaving or when something that is working could be improved.

- One stat that surprised me was the 65/35 split of male/female. Really? IT has seemed so male-dominated for so long, that it was nice to see that IT is getting some uptake from the fairer gender...I guess that's just not happening in the places where I've been working, where it seems more like 80/20. My daughter has a bit o' the geek about her (probably my fault), and has gotten into a few whiteboard conversations with me about networks and so on, so perhaps she'll join the ranks of IT'ers somewhere along the line.