What I learned this week, May 17, 2013


Esquire: The Best of What I’ve Learned


The Jobs Question: Work Is A Human Right


100 Great Workout Songs


The 75 Books Every Man Should Read

An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published. How many have you read?

I’ve read… 44 of these books, though many were so long ago I barely remember them. I hope I live long enough to get through them all.


A short film about the history of the place (sort of) where I work.

The Chip That Jack Built


Bicycle Lanes on the Jefferson Viaduct from Oak Cliff into downtown, Dallas.

Bicycle Lanes on the Jefferson Viaduct from Oak Cliff into downtown, Dallas.

NYC Study Finds Protected Bicycle Lanes Boost Local Business

Bike Lanes on Custer Road

Bike Lanes on Custer Road


Sorry, College Grads, I Probably Won’t Hire You

Takeaway from this article? Learn some programming.

In part, it’s not your fault. If you grew up and went to school in the United States, you were educated in a system that has eight times as many high-school football teams as high schools that teach advanced placement computer-science classes. Things are hardly better in the universities. According to one recent report, in the next decade American colleges will mint 40,000 graduates with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, though the U.S. economy is slated to create 120,000 computing jobs that require such degrees. You don’t have to be a math major to do the math: That’s three times as many jobs as we have people qualified to fill them.


Our 10 Favorite Books of 2012

Time Management

Texas Sculpture Garden,
Frisco, Texas

Zad Roumaya, Dallas
Time Management
2004 Aluminun, Paint
In Memory of Jody Young 1978-2004

Time Management, Zad Roumaya, feet hanging over the edge

Time Management, Zad Roumaya, feet hanging over the edge

“Life was not to be sitting in hot amorphic leisure in my backyard idly writing or not-writing, as the spirit moved me. It was, instead, running madly, in a crowded schedule, in a squirrel cage of busy people. Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing — singing, laughing, learning. The responsibility, the awful responsibility of managing (profitably) 12 hours a day for 10 weeks is rather overwhelming when there is nothing, noone, to insert an exact routine into the large unfenced acres of time — which it is so easy to let drift by in soporific idling and luxurious relaxing. It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockwork-like functioning community, and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up and float in the inrush, (or rather outrush,) of the rarified scheduled atmosphere — poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. That’s what it feels like: getting shed of a routine. Even though one had rebelled terribly against it, even then, one feels uncomfortable when jounced out of the repetitive rut. And so with me. What to do? Where to turn? What ties, what roots? as I hang suspended in the strange thin air of back-home?”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Time Management, Zad Roumaya, feet

Time Management, Zad Roumaya, feet

“Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report written on birds that he’d had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books about birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him put his arm around my brother’s shoulder, and said, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.”
― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Time Management, Zad Roumaya, Briefcase

Time Management, Zad Roumaya, Briefcase