Running Log 2009-07-19

Today's run: Shooting for my 5-miler this week
Distance - 5.07 miles
Time - 01:12:00

Grant's Trail, from Big Bend to Grant's Farm and back.
I did a brief walk in the middle at Grant's Farm, and walked the last 0.7 miles. So, I'm not really counting this as a 5-miler. Maybe next week.

I didn't blog it, but yesterday, we did about half this distance on Grant's trail with my mother-in-law, with me and the jogging stroller. Not a huge fan of running with the stroller, but it did provide some good tricep work.

Running Log 2009-07-16

Today's run: Trying to go a bit longer
Distance - 4.2 miles
Time - 00:53:00

I walked up a couple of hills... the Adams/Couch corner in Sugar Creek Valley is pretty steep.

Running Log 2009-07-14

Today's run: Running with Grandma tonight! (My mother-in-law.)
Distance - 2.7 miles
Time - 00:37:43

Not much distance tonight, but part of it was running up the hill in Sugar Creek Valley! Not fair!

Running Log 2009-07-13

Today's run: First one with my new shoes.
Distance - 4.69 miles
Time - 01:05:00

A running I will go!

I've decided to take up running as a standard part of my workout routine. I gave it a try several weeks ago... and realized it wasn't so bad. Maybe I was expecting a worse experience considering the 50+ ft elevation change that occurs withing 1/4 mile any direction of our house. There's no where to run from here that isn't a hill. Still, I went out running. Came back. Measured my route on Google Earth.... and realized I'd run 2 miles. Not bad.

Now I'm up to a nearly 4 mile routine (including warm-up / cool down).

Sarahlynn encouraged me to go find the "Marathon for non-Runners" book we had in the basement. We'll see.

At the very least, I've committed to 300 miles over the next year. That is, I bought good running shoes.

Wish me luck!

Mii NOT Fit, yet

We got a new Wii Fit exercise game last night: EA Active

I thought that I'd been getting a good, well rounded exercise routine with the eliptical machine, running, and occasional Wii Fit work out. My 40-minute workout last night blew me away. Way too many squats, squats on tip toe, roller-blading squat/jump.... my thighs are jelly this morning. Now there's some diversity in my workout. Wow!

Aggregate / Summary

One of my wife's pet peeves is when technologists take a word that already has clear meaning in the English language and then twist the definition to mean something not-quite-close-enough in a technical context. Great case-in-point in the world of data warehousing:

What is the difference between an aggregate and a summary?

I did a Google search and came up with a lot of junk floating around what I would consider some not very good answers (albeit from 2002) from some industry analysts. In fact, David Marco goes so far as to say "Summarized and aggregation are the same thing.


In my gut, there's always been a difference between an aggregate and a summary. So, I decided to try to articulate what the difference is. In doing so, my wife's advice of "just look in the dictionary" came in very handy.


Aggregate:
Comes from the Latin word for "to flock together" or "to flock or group."
Just to point out that there's nothing necessarily in that definition about the idea of reducing the specificity of something or the fact that the flock or group is made up of individuals. Rather, the idea is that there is a group of individual things acting together.

Summary:
From the Latin summa, one meaning of which is "total" or "sum," also the "principle or main thing."
Clearly, the idea with this root word is that a level of detail is being removed when the summary of something is presented. Rather than still being individual things, the summary of things is another layer of abstraction that represents the underlying detail.

Not so much the same thing.