We're working all day everyday on a SharePoint deployment at the Health Alliance right now. At one of our new facilities, West Chester Medical Center, we want to bring everybody up with their own personal sites. As anybody who's worked wtih My Sites can tell you, it's difficult.
Here's a problem that we ran into recently. We're working on a method to customize the default My Site as soon as it's provisioned, but it's clear that this will take some time. We need to present a demo before that's ready, so the fastest way to get the demo ready seemed to be to do some manual customizations on a few My Sites. The problem we ran into is that even as Farm Administrators, we still didn't have access to everyone's My Sites!
That's not a good situation. Even if we leave it disabled most of the time, we need to be able to get into the personal sites in emergencies.
Lots of Internet searching turned up no results and no users with similar problems. But here's what we figured out. In Central Administration, under Application Security and Policy for Web Application, we added ourselves directly into the policy as users with "Full Control" for the My Site host.
This is a step you should take anytime you want a user to be a full administrator of a web application. Now that it's solved, I found a post to this effect by Shane Young.