Better buildings and better for us!

This past February when the President announced his Better Buildings Initiative, it did send a positive jolt through the industry. Now fast forwarding to the present, last Friday brought news of the next step- a Presidential Memorandum announcing the Better Building Challenge. This latest effort features a ton of very powerful companies and a lot of cash from them to add to the government’s commitment that really should push things in the right direction. The focus now has $2 billion to use on upgrading federal buildings, as well as another $2 billion of private money (from those powerful companies I hinted to above) for energy efficiency projects of existing buildings. The improvement of existing buildings is a biggie as it plays into the hot segment of retrofit and it fills the huge hole that we have as a society in that our older buildings suck a ton of energy thanks to outdated and underperforming products. Hopefully this initiative does not get bogged down or stuck in a game of political football. Too much good can come from it.

Elsewhere…

-- I got painfully lost last week and did not have my GPS. All I can say is the GPS is the greatest invention ever. Will never get into a car without it. Plus that means I’ll never get to do the TV show “The Amazing Race” because I have zero sense of direction.

-- The sale of Southwall to Solutia was formally completed this week. It will be fun to watch how this plays out. There’s potential for some great synergies to happen and combining of some very good people. Not sure of how it will work but teaming the likes of the awesome pair of Aimee Davis and Julie Schimmelpenningh of Solutia with top performers like Bruce Lang and Tom Marsh at Southwall and you have insane possibilities.

-- This past Thursday, the U.S. Senate passed the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act that contained an amendment to buy American made solar products. The Buy American Solar Amendment will ensure that "Buy American" requirements apply to all photovoltaic (PV) devices that supply power Department of Defense property or facilities. This will be big because the Department of Defense will be required to comply with this act and closes a previous loophole that amazingly allowed these properties to buy products from foreign entities. This could be a nice boon for the U.S. Solar segment and for the folks in the glass industry who are working in it.

-- Just a heads up on some fantastic technical resources available… Glass Magazine has some very helpful pieces available… click here for more details. All I can say is it never hurts to have the knowledge. The smarter you can be in this competitive landscape the better.

-- Thank you to all who checked in on my brother on his hospital adventures. He was just released and is now taking the road back to recovery. Slowly but surely he’ll be back at it and hopefully no more issues come up!

-- Normally this would be in the links section, but this piece was too good. A very interesting read on the great depression, the “banksters” and the guy who brought them to justice. Very ironic as some parts of history really do repeat!

-- Last this week- college football is winding down… and lost amongst the wild weekend of games was my alma mater Ohio U choking at their chance to win the MAC Championship. Brutal. Ohio had a 20-point lead at half, only to lose 23-20 at the gun. Fellow Bobcat and AGC Sales icon Rodger Ruff had to witness the carnage in person. Hopefully he’s recovering, because that was painful.

LINKS of the WEEK:

-- OK- this is a great discussion point… guy comes in to rob your store- you have a gun… do you shoot him dead or do you first give him a warning shot? Read the article here and decide…

-- I guess one place a GPS doesn’t help is when you get lost in the woods searching for a Christmas tree. This family got lost and quite frankly got very lucky to get out.

-- OK now this will depress me… your printer, yes your printer can be susceptible to a virus or hackers. Wonderful.

VIDEO of the WEEK:

Fast-forward to the one minute mark here- for a stunt that went very wrong at an event in Brazil. Good news is, the stuntman did survive and were actually BACK at work the next day!! Heck if I just rode the bike, I’d be in too much pain to work, let alone what happened here.