I wouldn't go any larger than 22". Spend the extra cash you have on one or two additional monitors. For the price of a single 24" monitor, you could get roughly 3 20" monitors. Scott Hanselman blogged about the advantages of 3 monitors here http://www.hanselman.com/blog/ThreeMonitorsICantGoBack.aspx[^] The main thing is that you can leave the center monitor as your development environment and use the 2 side monitors for things that you do, but not every minute, such as e-mail, your web page in Firefox, your web page in IE, your IM tool, etc. It allows you to toggle back and forth. So you can see the web page that you're editing as well as the code without resizing, toggling, finding your place again, etc.

I worked in Accounting and almost entered the actuarial field before deciding to move into programming. Accountants don't make all that much and it's a dwindling field. It turns out that a lot of reconciliations, forecasts, etc. that are currently being managed by people can be handled through, EGADS, software. And I agree with you, programming = fun, actuarial science = dullest, driest stuff on earth.

I can't believe someone would put so much thought and effort into determining why someone else's profession sucks. I wonder if he's a single guy who spends time explaining to his friends how much their girlfriends suck.