I usually do it when I'm setting up the environment, before it goes into Production.

You need to change it to Synchronous Commit and wait for it to catch up before you do the failover if you want to fail over with no data loss.

I'm assuming here that you want to query a readable secondary in an AlwaysOn Availability Group, and that:

1) your Availability Group is already configured with a readable replica.

You can technically set it up on a single-node cluster (but that's kind of pointless). For actual HA you'll need at least one more SQL instance on the same cluster...

No, it doesn't break the log chain.

Check out Perry's Stairway.

http://www.sqlservercentral.com/stairway/112556/

There would definitely have to be consequences. Good managers should manage these things as a matter of course, but very few managers are actually good. It's the same with remote...

I own up straight away. There was one time I briefly thought I'd taken out a live trading system, and my blood ran absolutely cold but I went and told...

You can't you'll need to take a Full backup before you can take any log backups. Until you take a Full backup the database will be in a state known...

Agreed. Unless somebody specifically selects a gender designation form they've filled in, it's hugely, hugely problematic to "assign" one on the basis of a finger in the air calculation.

I'm so jealous of the Vancouver Island plans!

I don't have anything booked for this summer but I'm planning to go to Cape Town in December. Would be nice...

Can you restore it under a new name?

How frequently are you taking the log backups, and can you improve the frequency so that you have more, (usually) smaller files?