There's a fourth alternative. Dig a hole and put up a headstone.

>>OK, I'll bite. What does this have to do with programming? Are you making some subtle derogatory comment? I'm kidding! ;)
>>
>
>Hi Mike,
>
>Believe it or not, to me this is a highly relevant piece of news. Let me explain...
>
>I'm involved in a project that involves moving data from alpha4 (yes, you read correctly) to a web server.
>
>Every weekend, the owner of the company (yes, you read correctly again) runs a number of searches that bring up inconsistent/incorrect data, and he fixes it manually (and yes, you keep reading correctly).
>
>A few months ago, we had a meeting. The owner, the project manager, another developer and myself went over the work that the owner does every weekend.
>
>Frank (the other developer), explained to the owner that there are two ways to handle the problems he's finding and fixing every weekend. He used sheep as an example, and his example mentioned that you have a herd that grazes close to a clif, and every day a few sheep fall off.
>
>You can either live with it and pick up the dead sheep, or you can build a fence and prevent the problem in the first place!
>
>The owner jumped in (joking, of course) and said that you had a third alternative: put a restaurant at the bottom of the cliff!
>
>Anyway, as you see, this story about all the sheep jumping IS relevant to this project - I just emailed them the link.
>
>Now back to our regular [sheepless] programming...
>
>:-) Alex