My home system is a 27" iMac i7 with 16 gig of memory, in my backpack next to me is an Air laptop. I run Parallels and Win 7 when I need SQL or Access. I scrapped my home Windows systems years ago, though there's a possibility that I may acquire another for development and games. It's all my wife's fault: the observatory's data center is exclusively *nix, most non-Apple boxes are probably running Red Hat. It's really nice having computers that don't crash and don't have to be updated weekly (or so it seems).

I just finished cleaning up a data set for a test load that came from Excel. It had five duplicate records that should not have been there, one child with a birth date of October 35th, and a kid with a last name of Null. And this is data uploaded to a federal register. I hope whoever is responsible for this did a good job of cleaning it and found the problems that I did.

In the future, this will come from my database and will be cleaner. Pretty much anything is doable with computers, it's a matter of time and sometimes budget.

And Steve, thanks for the link. Now I want a fire-breathing pony!