Just saw this in CNN’s breaking news. An Iraqi journalist threw his shoe at President Bush (check out the video from that site) during a Press conference in Iraq. The shoe thrower’s action just summed up how the Iraqi feels about the guy responsible for their country’s invasion and the after effect of it being thrust into civil war between Sunni’s and Shiite’s.

Throwing a shoe at somebody or exposing the heel of your shoe is considered an ultimate insult in the Muslim culture.

My wife had the best response to all of this, she told me: “I can’t wait to see what Saturday Night Live has to say about this.”

President Bush arrived in Iraq as part of his farewell tour before he steps down as President of the Country which is the 2nd Largest Carbon Emitter and No.1 Opposer of the Kyoto Protocol.

Under his watch he used the threat of Weapons of Mass Destruction to invade Iraq. Some say it was so that his business buddies could could partake of Iraq’s oil. Problem is, any war in the middle east usually drives the prices of gas up. There wasn’t any considerable moves to tackle global warming and energy independence during his 8 years in office.

Bush’s legacy can be summarized with this:

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The Don Emilio Abello Awards for Energy Efficiency were recently awarded to SM City North EDSA, SM City Sucat, SM City Sta. Mesa and SM City Manila. While the SM Mall of Asia was the Philippine Entry to the ASEAN Energy Efficiency and Conservation Best Practices for Buildings contest. Their energy saving practices resulted in over P38M worth of savings for the malls.
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The Pride of the Philippines, Manny Pacquiao, recently defeated Oscar “The Golden Boy” De La Hoya via TKO in the 8th round of their match in Las Vegas, Nevada over the weekend.

So what does this match have to do about the environment? Well I just realized how a Pacquiao match saves the environment so much by the amount of cars that get off the street during the few hours that the fight is on. The whole country is on a virtual stand still as it awaits the outcome of the match.

I myself experienced this during his fight with Morales last November 18, 2006. I was on the road driving across Mindanao while the fight was on and I remarked to the person beside me that I could practically floor the accelerator, let go of the steering wheel and never have to worry about hitting anything because everybody was inside their houses watching the fight.
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Ever since I’ve started this blog I’ve been more energy conscious than I already was. The drive to reduce our electricity and lower cost has been taken up like a religion for me. It all started with doing an energy audit of the house and reducing our electric bill by about 40% by getting rid of energy hogs or replacing appliances with more energy efficient ones.

Cooking wise we’ve switched to an electric stove since LPG prices were going sky high on us. We’ve also lowered our footprint by limiting our car use to just once per week, when we have to do groceries.
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While Philippine Bioethanol production is still ramping up in order to meet the requirements of the Philippine Biofuel Law, Oil players are allowed to import their bioethanol requirements from abroad.

The Philippine Biofuel Law has provisions which allow for importation of biofuels is local supply cannot meet the demand. Which is what the 3 major oil players (Petron, Shell and Chevron) are doing.

In order to save on importation costs they announced that they are talking over the idea to import their bioethanol requirements jointly in order to get volume discounts.

[source]

Rasmus Lerdorf, the father of the PHP Hypertext language that powers almost all of the web’s programs said in a talk recently the importance of writing efficient code for the environment.

This was said while using PHP frameworks as an example. A framework is a ready set structure of code already pre developed for developers to use in order to speed up their programming by not having to write code commonly used in software. It greatly aids in cutting down development time and cost. But because it tries to solve all of the programmers needs there is a tendency to have a code bloat which can affect performance.
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