Dallas Is Top 10

CNN/Money has included Dallas in it's list of top 10 U.S. cities for job growth through 2015. The amazing thing that I observed while looking through the stats for the 10 cities mentioned, is that the ratio of median salary to median house price was WAY lower than any of the other cities. Sometimes we forget just how well we have it here.

In fact, I was driving in a historic area last weekend and came across a house I just loved! It was a 1913 2-story Craftsman Bungalow (I currently have a one-story) in great condition. The asking price was definitely in my reach. In what other city could I buy a big historical house in a cool neighborhood with an upper/mid-level corporate salary?

Other cities in the top 10 include Las Vegas, Orlando, Riverside, Austin, Phoenix, Jacksonville, Tampa, Charlotte and Atlanta.

Japanese Blogging

This surprised me. Did you know that the Japanese language is the most dominant language used by bloggers? The graph below (done by Technorati) shows that Japanese is used in 37% of all blogs while English is used in 31%. Making this more surprising is that the population of the United States is 295,734,134 while the population of Japan is 127,417,244 which is a ratio of 2.3! And that is not counting other English speaking nations. But this could be skewed based on the analysis below.

David Sifry of Technorati offers the following insights which I will paraphrase. English, while being the language of the majority of early bloggers, has fallen to less than a third of all blog posts in April 2006. Japanese and Chinese language blogging has grown significantly. He notes that Japanese bloggers appear to write shorter posts more often. This could be a result of blogging from mobile phones, and may be skewing the results, given that we are tracking the total number of posts in this analysis.

Another Fun Weekend

Last weekend I did a number of fun things. Really, springtime in Dallas is loaded with good weather and a lot of cool events. Of course in the back of everyone's mind is the impending doom of the coming searing heat of the summer.

On Saturday I attended an open house at an artist's loft near downtown. The building was an old cotton gin and dates from 1870. It now houses about 30 artists (most rent for studio space, some sleep there). The open house allowed us to visit with artists, see their work and discuss it with them. There was also a flamenco dance studio there headed by a dancer that we recognized from the Dallas Opera. I felt very Soho!

On Saturday evening, my group of Dallas Theater Center subscribers saw the musical play Hank Williams: Lost Highway. I knew very little about Hank Williams and didn't realize that he died at the young age of 30 from drugs and alcohol. The performances were unbelievably good and they made me want to go out and get some Hank Williams records!

On Sunday, I went on my annul trek up to the Denton Arts and Jazz Festival. The weather was perfect, the funnel cake was awesome and the music, while not strictly jazz as I like it (see my podcast from last year's show) it is always terrific to hear good musicians, enjoy a good crowd and eat food that is really bad for you!