Good morning saturday! Good morning Penang! Good morning world! Ha,ha. I woke up to a drizzle, such an optimum ambient temperature to sleep more and woke up late. Ha,ha.

I should be strolling along Dato Keramat road to find sport shop to restring my tennis racquet but here I am, cuddling up my pillow under my blanket, enjoying the saturday morning, such a sheer bliss!

Anyhow, I managed to drag myself out from the bed and with the help of coffee (and facebook), I’m anchoring my butt to the chair, and blogging and doing research on my thesis project. Ah.

I’ll be doing on the influence of paving materials to the ambient temperature in the outdoor recreational spaces. Everybody must have been experiencing the heat from where you stand/walk. Yes, those are radiation that being reflected back to the atmosphere from the pavement. I am going to do my research on that! On how the surface, the color and type of construction material influencing the ambient temperature in the outdoor spaces. I got a supervisor that specialize in energy efficiency and thermal comfort for building/architecture, so I guess it should be the same for the outdoor spaces 🙂

Most of the studies related to landscape architecture would be investigating on how the trees influencing the thermal comfort that leads to more into microclimate study, but what I am investigating is to know which materials, surface roughness and color that affecting the shortwave radiation and high emissivity factor to the long wave radiation which may reduce the effect of head island in the broader global warming context through hardscape material selection.

I managed to get this idea during my last day of internship. I went to the client-consultant meeting with the fellow landscape architect at Putrajaya where the meeting solely dedicated to issues related to landscape architect scope. One of the main concern of the main contractor was the selection of pavement material at one of the proposed area where they want to meet the green building index criteria and the consultant recommendation a darker color of material (which by common sense will absorb more heat, hence increasing the energy needed in which directly affecting the energy efficiency of the building. OK I admit, I wasn’t really listening hard during the meeting though I did jot down the important points for the LA to bring the issue to the designer back in the office, but that issue kept me wondering what type of impervious materials/color/textures that able to influence the outdoor temperature, and at the same time able to reduce the urban heat island effect). To get the certification, greenstar whatsoever, you need to consider all of these tiny little thing. Since the world suddenly becoming more aware on environmental concern, these green buildings ideas spread throughout the world, and suddenly everyone want to be green. Like, duh.

Coming from the environment-background, I can’t help but becoming skeptical with all the environmental awareness nowadays. OK, it is for good cause, but somehow it does make a tagline for someone else to make profit, to make ‘good’ names by doing good GREEN deeds to the environment. I.e. New invention of green/hybrid car/motocycles to reduce the carbon emission. OK. GOOD.

But, how would you weigh the situation where more and more people buying say hybrid car (that say reduce the co2 emission) and the number of buyer increasing over time. Don’t you think it come to the same thing when more people buying hybrids car and STILL emitting co2 (there are NO SUCH THING AS ZERO WASTE, there is only waste reduction and minimization) and in the overall calculation, the emission of co2 is STILL the same. Ok, there might be slight reduction in numbers BUT, still the source(s) still increasing overtime? Are we still in the same page here? 🙂

Back to my research, I am trying to download a Gantt chart project software for mac now as I am too lazy to use the Microsoft Project that require me to install in my xp. I’m starting to dislike the bootcamp, I prefer virtualization. Afterall, I am only using XP for my autoCAD software. The rest, ie. sketchup, offices, photoshop, lightroom solely running in Mac.