Absorbing An Adventurous Week

I feel like this blog is like the old episodes of Sesame Street that were brought to you by a letter, so this week, it’s brought to you by the letter A, as a bunch of subjects I have started with that letter so may as well be creative.

A for Architectural Billings Index. Well, it shocked the world again this month and stayed positive and barely a blip under last month. Am I good with the positivity? Absolutely. Am I leery of the results? No doubt. Something feels off. There were down numbers, specifically, the Northeast went underwater for the first time in a few months, so I guess that feels like reality. Still I will wonder in a year+ what it will look like market-wise for us. If things are going great then these guys were right, and as I always say, I’ll gladly eat crow. Note that construction starts in June did slow somewhat, so that may be affecting my feelings here. 

A is for Active in the Active Shooter profile news that the NGA broke this week. The ASTM standard in that space is huge. For too many years the lack of a clear and logical standard really made things muddy. This is a great step in the right direction. Huge kudos to the legendary Julie Schimmelpenningh of Eastman for doing her thing here to get this over the finish line.

A for the awesome Andrew Haring who was on the Glazing Guru podcast last week. It was a good interview and the guru John Spelman did a nice job drawing some answers out of the king of all Glass Nerds. Good listen overall.

A is for AIA, and their awards for small projects are out. Some interesting designs, and kudos to those who used glass more prominently, like Jessie’s House in Austin. A lot of this is not my taste but thought it was a cool one to check out.

And A is the beginning letter for a word I never heard of. See my last nugget for that one.

Elsewhere...

Sign battles

 This “sign battle” went viral, but I first saw it from my pal Kevin Grammens of Target Mentality, the best mental health and business coach around, and I loved the marketing aspect, but also the way these folks figured out how to playfully work with each other for the greater good. Tremendous back and forth.

Residential news

This may not be relevant to the folks in the commercial business but some big moves on the residential side with the latest update to Energy Star and the potential now that thin triples and VIG are big time in play. I am happy for folks like Mike Rapp of PDS IG Equipment and Michael Spellman of VIG Technologies as those guys have worked hard to develop products to fit these needs, and they had waddle through a ton of choppy waters to get to this point. 

Hard-to-get glass for Tesla

This is intriguing. Evidently, a Tesla executive is under fire for purchasing a special type of “hard-to-get” glass for Elon Musk for his personal use. The story does not say the special type of glass, but did note it was purchased because of supply chain issues. The richest man in the world even struggles with glass too.  

Looking ahead to GlassBuild

Now that an awesome Glass Conference has been put to bed, it’s full speed ahead to GlassBuild in October. I am so pumped for it; lots of new things happening, some fresh education approaches and old favorites like Connor Lokar talking economy.

Given our world right now, just attending to see and hear what Connor says is worth it. Registration is open now, and don’t dawdle on the hotel room either. Get it all done now at GlassBuild.com.

Difficult Wordle

Last this week, Wordle folks, the word on Thursday was APHID. I swear I have never seen that word, used that word, nada. I am sure ultra-brains like Dr. Kayla Natividad and Tom O’Malley got it in two tries, but I have to say in the long time I have been playing this game this is the first word where I was like “this is a word?” I did get lucky and get it, only because I had four letters and played every combo just seeing if it would accept it. When it did on APHID I was stunned.