Comparing

A friend recently posted on Facebook:

Stop comparing yourself to others..start loving yourself :)

Funny. I compare myself to others when I want to feel good about myself.

712,958 Steps in 12 Weeks

A few months ago at work we got an irresistible offer to join a program meant to motivate people into keeping fit. Irresistible because it's completely free.
The deal is we get a free pedometer in the mail, and for 12 weeks we report our results on pedometer steps, exercise minutes, and weight management. I was less interested in the exercise and weight goals-- my weight is just fine. But I have come to develop a bizarre fondness for gathering data on things normally taken for granted, so having a pedometer was an alluring prospect.
My total: 712,958 steps.

Pedometer steps per day

My most active day (29,646 steps) was on May 29, when I joined a 10K fun run in the morning, then went to the Mall of Asia in the afternoon. Only one other day breached the 20,000 step level.

My least active day (1,138 steps) was on July 25, when I stayed at home all morning, slept all afternoon, and worked from home at night.

Pedometer steps per week, 12 weeks.

This weekly graph shows the same data but looks more stable, less affected by daily events.

Cumulative pedometer steps

The kit included a little booklet that I used to track my daily progress of steps, exercise minutes, and weight management. It also included a rough guide to how many steps you should be taking for a healthy lifestyle. The recommended number to aim for is 10,000.

• Under 5,000 is Sedentary
• 5,000-7,500 is Low Active
• 7,500-10,000 is Somewhat Active
• 10,000-12,500 is Active
• Over 12,500 is Highly Active.

For me, simply getting to work means walking for about 1 km-- or 1200 steps-- so I'm already pretty much assured of 2,400 steps per workday. Still, only one third of my days reached that magical 10,000 step target. Worse, another one third of my days failed to reach even 5,000 steps-- which is classified not only inactive, but sedentary:

Other numbers to look at:

• Days: 84
• Total steps: 712,958
• Most steps in one day: 29,646 (May 29)
• Least steps in one day: 1,138 (July 25)
• Average steps per day: 8488
• Most steps in one week: 88,813 (Aug 1-7)
• Least steps in one week: 36,869 (July 4-10)
• Average steps per week: 59,413
• Days with over 10,000 steps ("Active"): 28 (33%)
• Days with under 5,000 steps ("Sedentary"): 33 (39%)

Assuming an average stride length of 80 cm (a figure I came up with just now from a few minutes of Googling), my total steps in those 12 weeks would add up to 570 km, which is approximately the straight line distance from Manila to Cebu.

The 12-week program may be over but I'm still wearing the pedometer this very moment. I think I'll decrease the tracking of my progress to a weekly basis now though, lest I lose my mind in graphs and statistics.

Flood of Wedding Photos

Well we finally received the complete set of photographs from our wedding photographer, and I was immediately crushed by the sheer volume of it. The whole thing came on 10 DVDs. Not CDs, but DVDs, each of them with their storage capacity reasonably used up.

The photos are shot at a resolution of 4288x2848, and average about 5 MB per image, with the largest ones reaching 10 MB. I had to copy them straight from the DVDs to my external hard disk because I simply did not have space for them on the actual laptop.

Here's a breakdown of where all these pictures are coming from:

Granted, the vast majority of these are duplicates, and it's not uncommon to have 15 images of the same pose with minuscule variations:

It will take several days-- perhaps weeks-- to sort through them and clear out the redundancies, choose the favorites, and post them on Facebook (that is, of course, the point).

Here's a random image. Not even one of the greatest photos, just a good random one:

Credit must be given where it is due: Our wedding photographer was Rolando Pascua, who is based in Cebu, extremely talented, and worth every cent.

The YouTube Alphabet

YouTube's search does the same thing as Google does, suggesting the most popular search queries when you begin typing something. Here's a list of YouTube's top suggestions for each letter of the alphabet. Perhaps predictably, almost all of them are related to music.

• adele rolling in the deep
• bruno mars lazy song
• chris brown
• drake
• eminem
• friday rebecca black
• give me everything pitbull
• how to love lil wayne
• im on one
• justin bieber
• katy perry
• lazy song bruno mars
• michael jackson
• nicki minaj
• on the floor jennifer lopez
• party rock anthem
• queen
• rihanna
• super bass nicki minaj
• the lazy song bruno mars
• usher
• victorious
• wiz khalifa
• x men first class trailer
• youtube
• zumba

Special credit goes to Bruno Mars for taking B, L, and T.

The Google Alphabet

Start typing into Google's text box and it suggests to you the most common search queries. Here's a list of the top suggestions for each letter of the alphabet. The unsurprising result is a veritable who's who of internet giants, retailers, common search terms-- and for good measure, some companies I have never heard of.

• amazon
• best buy
• craigslist
• dictionary
• ebay
• facebook
• google
• hotmail
• imdb
• jet blue
• kohls
• lowes
• mapquest
• netflix
• orbitz
• pandora
• quotes
• redbox
• southwest
• target
• usps
• verizon
• weather
• xbox
• youtube
• zillow