Thang Nguyen 555

Cultures on Collision Course

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With some short-term relief work in Asia/Africa and long stint in Telecom, Thang also earned a B.A. at Pennsylvania State University. M.A. in Communication at Wheaton Graduate School, M.A. in Cross-Cultural Communication at Gordon-Conwell Seminary, Boston. In addition, he earned a CELTA – classes taken in Hanoi for cultural re-immersion.

Tag: Africa

  • Shore this!

    It’s not good enough with automation. They need to combine that with outsourcing, off-shoring, in-shoring and now, near-shoring.  The idea is to line up the  Filippino call-center workers at mid-night (to go to work, not in line for next-day Black Friday sales) to make a go at scripted greetings like “Have I done everything to your satisfaction”.…

  • Mobile books

    I was waiting for my scooter ride outside Cho Ray Hospital when a peddler approached me. “Want to pick something to read?”. Turned out, she was selling used books, in a box: Cu Chi Tunnel, My Lai Massacre, When Heaven and Earth Changed Places, Sorrows of War, Understanding Vietnam… Those subjects are now as old…

  • Blind in wilderness

    Years ago, I took a course in Wilderness Survival. One of the classmates was a blind Korean guy.  The others all white males. We were to spend the entire five days in the White Mountain of New Hampshire, with one solo day. Our “final” was rock repelling. I kept looking in my teammate’s eyes and…

  • Sand bag Body bag

    A Thai monk needs to lay more sandbags to stem the flow of water, while Libyan fighters can now lay down their guns since the Colonel was finally in the bag, body bag. One country exports rice, the other oil. Back in 1997, Thailand’s rising real estate bubble nearly took down neighboring Asian Tigers with it. This time, its rising waters will surely drive…

  • Load-lightening with clouds

    Load balancing, redundancy, follow-the-sun operation centers etc.. to be topped up by cloud. We did that with business phones (Centrex), and mainframes. More than a third of North American phones are now smart phones, with computational power not unlike earlier version of our desktops. When Turing and Shannon conceived a  “thinking machine”, they were just happy if…

  • Cote D’Ivoire as I recall

    I set foot on Cote d’Ivoire  summer 86. Abidjan looked like former Saigon. Both were built on French architecture template. Next door Ghanians got shinier skin. But hearing French spoken by the people there made me feel at home. In fact, so at home that I, upon discovering a Vietnamese restaurant in town, stopped in for lunch. And they did…

  • Beauty, yes. Beast, no.

    Elizabeth Taylor and Colonel Gaddafi. What do they have in common? Nothing, except for being on the cover of People and TIME, respectively. The Queen of Tinsel Town once played Cleopatra, while the Colonel orchestrated his self-ascendency to be King of Kings (Africa). She was surrounded by men (husbands) he women (bodyguards). Liz hung out with…

  • South-South emergence

    A Vietnamese film director, a Japanese novelist, a Beatles title (which I read the Vietnamese translation bought in Hanoi)= Norwegian Wood. http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/film/norwegian-wood-film-a-labour-of-love Indian telecom companies bought out Middle Eastern counterparts to target mobile market in Africa. China beefs up its investment in construction and rare earth mining in S America, Australia and Africa. These are…