Thang Nguyen 555

Hillary is showing to have suffered a bad fall.
I wish her well. Hope this doesn’t impede her schedule around the globe. We need her more than ever at this time.
I also wish the media would exercise journalistic restraints  by not showing her in cast (what happen to close-ups?)

Nixon was shown holding up peace signs when boarding Helicopter 1.

Johnson grew hippie hair during retirement. And Bill Clinton also in cast.
“I need a hero” (Bonnie Tyler), but our heroes are also human. Mrs Clinton  knocked on doors during voter drive campaigns, fought for child protection legislation, and started her early career in Arkansas where she met her husband. The couple, however, weren’t immune  from Hollywood-like saga, and also had their share of accidents (yet Bill was taking down the Stanford bunk-bed himself for Chelsea,  heroes can’t be more human than that!).

Enough for self-projection onto our archetypes. Our collective fantasy could be better served by Ho and Bollywood. It’s admirable enough for Hillary to start out in her 60’s hair and granny glasses, to now represent the United States of America in power suits. With or without cast, Hillary exemplifies the best of breeds.

Retail stores are pushing Dads and Grads cards and gifts.
Today, my Aimy (hip-hop queen) is graduating from high school. Valley High, as a matter of fact (not Silicon, but San Fernando). During her 18 years of existence, she has seen changes from brick phones to touch phones. She has also lived through a few earthquakes here and there, the Rodney King riot, and now she witnesses Obama telecommute from upstairs of the White House (Presidents live not in Presidential Palace, but in just a “house”,  like in ” house of rising sun”).  Aimy, however, has been living in Hotel California, with her friends, her baby sitter all people of color. Her hip-hop team however is led by a cool white coach.
But the rest of her champion hip-hop team comprise of  brownies. Yet my Aimy is 100% American,
a product of Egg McMuffins, BK’ s French toasts, Taco Bell’s tacos. To her, race is beautiful. Texting is cool.
And the future holds infinite possibilities. I, Dad, just have to make sure that I don’t stand in the way.
Coming here at the age of 19, I already had my preferences all formulated (taste of music, food and clothes e.g. Neil Young, who is that?). Aimy, however, grows up in a world full of acronyms, some of them she and friends invented so as to save money on shorter SMS texts while feeling cohesive at the same time.
I wish her luck, and remind myself that adults (and leaders) are best when they can create a condition, an environment and an ethos that facilitate optimal growth, mistakes allowed and already factored in. I can’t stand those who from the outset, created unworthy goals, then spend the rest of  their lives trying to micro-manage their unrevised assumptions, inadvertently, becoming  “prisoners of their own devices” as the Eagles still sings on.

 

http://health.yahoo.com/news/healthday/haveapurposeinlifeyoumightlivelonger.html

The last time I looked, it was eating sushi. Now, it’s to have a purpose in life (must be dementia-free and 68- year- old to be included in the research ). Here in Florida, I was asked if I had a senior citizen discount card. In California, I was flattered when I  got carded while trying to get into a night club. In Vietnam, I got asked to have my degree authenticated at least 5 times before it gets translated. But on WordPress, all I need if I want to is to click on twitter app, then I am on. Being a slight late adopter, I need to be up to speed on twitter before “following” people. For now, let me figure out the grandiose purpose in life so I can live a little bit longer. That way, I can twitter more, or whatever the next app comes along. In the words of Gloria Gaynor, “although I was petrified, …I will survive, hey, hey!.”

Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum (Does anybody notice that the 3M’s:  McLuhan, Moore and Metcalfe are all important in tech?) still rings true today. So many people are coming out with post-mortem on the current recession. Sub-prime over booking and clever repackaging/marketing of securitization are often mentioned. But so far, I haven’t come across a piece  that devotes to the speed and ease with which foreign buyers can access these AAA-rated financial packages. It’s the bandwidth stupid!  The (over) build-out during the dot.com era paved the information superhighway and made possible the global marketing of  “sure-thing” loan packages.
There you have it! If we had to wait for the steam ships to come (as in the old days)  we would have still be standing at the dock to wait for the loan doc arrival (pre-Fedex era).

The speed of transmission was faster than human ability to cope. And herd instinct takes over (Ponzi) .  Anyway, that which doesn’t kill us makes us strong. Hopefully, via the same medium (broadband) and its speed, investors can in the same vein pull us out of the bear market just as quick. Bigger hose fills the tank quicker,  and things will float. You got to love the medium. It’s  neither good nor evil. It just happens to be the “message” .

“Thin client” has nothing to do with putting your desktop through a South Beach diet program. It is part of the migration from desktop to cloud computing. BTW, these “thin clients” will soon make our flat screen TV’s obsolete when fiber-enabled bandwidth arrived at our doorstep.
I have been telecommuting for about a decade now. Thus, I need David Allen to come out with a book, not on Getting Things Done, but on how to give yourself a (cleaning) service contract, and it should be tax-deductible. I wrote about the need for social networking on my previous blogs, as opposed to Emily who wrote a piece in CSM that Facebook and the likes mistook community for commodity. She must be sitting in the library or teaching  at city college, and can’t wait to replenish her energy by being alone (assuming she is introverted). I am, on the other hand, need to interact with people to boost up my energy. Sort of like sunflowers that need sunshine.
Or else, I will gain a few pounds here and there, while my desktop gets “thinner” every year. Send in the cloud!

Emily who teaches at Long Island and also P/Ting as a librarian has written an opinion piece on Facebook’s shadow culture (http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0611/p09s03-coop.html). She quotes Aristotle’s “a friend to all is a friend to none”. Harsh words. I would say we are living in an age of commoditization, friendship included. Lucky for us, LinkedIn has not gone IPO just yet and somehow off Emily’s radar of criticism. Is there anything wrong with connecting with old colleagues (MCI people are still commenting on its culture, and many would love to “Do it again”) and finding a better career opportunity? Especially when you are a Mr Mom from West Palm Beach, seeking a Vietnam opportunity. I love social network and crowd-sourcing, whatever Emily says. This is my opinion, and I challenge hers.

Train crash or auto accident? B choice!
My sincere condolence to the surviving husband who was spared (not sure about his state of being, but he and his wife had missed the Air France flight which crashed miles away from Brazil two weeks ago).
His wife however was reported dead by head-on collision
in Australia a week later. We all narrowly escaped mini-deaths each day: from people who try to “run over” us, or belittle us by their cold comment (for lack of social intelligence) . I, by the way, did not “bribe” any of my colleagues or boss who sent nice recommendations on LinkedIn. They help me relive the glory of mission accomplished. I love recommending people.
How can you not see the beauty and grace in each person! He/she might be here today, and gone tomorrow, while
trying to escape Death each in his/her own way everyday. As to the stuff, they all someday end up in Goodwill stores.

Life to the fullest! Cheers!

BBC World News today shows a map where 141  H1N1 deaths are located.

Somehow, none of the red ink lands in Africa (Yes!)
Virus go where they want. Back in the 80’s, it was AIDS  (predominantly African-originated).
Now, it’s H1N1 in N America. Health, environment, economy. In which order on this hot June day? I got my Masters degree authenticated by Department of State, just in case I need to get back to Vietnam to teach. It was
cool to see Hillary’s signature on the cover. God bless her!

It’s just a new release on DVD. But I couldn’t help notice the subtle introduction of a new kind of cop: women (Naomi Watts) who want to protect their families when faced with organized crime threat. That leaves Clive Owen as the lone rogue agent.
We are living in an age of empowerment: a confluence of tech shift, time shift and (information flow) direction shift.
Twitter users can now start a side conversation, discretely. There was a time when ABC experimented with 3 evening anchors, but the broadcast was still one-way. Now the people got mad, they won’t take it anymore (a famous line from  Network, a 70’s movie): they reinvent and express themselves, 140 characters at a time. It won’t be long before they do it in Chinese, whose characters I believe say more than Latin’s.