I played around with some animations to get a sort of limp posture.
Ended up completely re-rigging manual once I realized just how badly the automatic weightings had messed things up.
I was also thinking it would be cool to have a sort of rush to attention pose but am still working on that. The limited number of bones seems to make this more difficult. Particularly what I notice with having the offset between the arms/legs and spine – there tends to be a very specific range where things rotate correctly (part of a problem brought on by disproportionate geometry to bones in my case – see elongated body 
).
I also ran into a situation where certain bones would not allow me to move them in the 3d window, but if I typed the numbers in they would move properly.
Overall it was a good experience even if it took a little longer figuring out where problems were happening and why. I am looking forward to seeing what would happen with a more humanoid form, with a more complex bone structure, or even animals.