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: Disneyland

  • We can handle the truth

    We here are people who fled Vietnam in various waves (pre-1975, 1975, and post-1975) and have settled in Little Saigon, Orange County, CA. I have seen the strip transformed, from a few stores to be what it is today: patch work of mini plazas interlacing with mobile home parks, often times, reflections of the boom and…

  • Turning Tragedy into Triumph

    It’s on the Post. It’s on Linkedin. It’s in your face. It’s about tourism to America. Or the decline of. You would think people love to flock to the big Apple, to Disneyland and to Las Vegas. But lately, it doesn’t happen (tourists prefer destinations like Turkey over the USA). To top that, we got bad…

  • The things they still carry

    The war novel with similar title was surprisingly good. I have known about it for a while, but couldn’t get myself to “carry” it home. Until now. Until it’s translated into Vietnamese. It’s the opposite of reading Bao Ninh‘s The Sorrows of War in English. Both novels had the same setting, same period, same conflict, same ending…

  • Jobs’ off switch

    Steve Jobs hated the on-off  switch. Perhaps more so because it was a relic of electricity (Edison) and automobile manufacturers (Ford). He did not like old wine in the same wineskin, given our always-on Cloud Service in  A/C data centers. Apple chose North Carolina as a site to store music, video and the rest of its customers’…

  • Unfortunate guy and the happiest place

    I still remember Sang. He helped me set up sound equipment on the weekend (my attempt to crowd-source and create an open-air coffee-house for refugees), and attended my class on weekdays. Sang was in that transition camp in Hong Kong, on his way to Norway, his new home. I was feeling sorry for him, an…

  • Aimy Telephony

    Aimy’s birthday is this Friday. She was born in Burbank, while I was still trying to close a telephony deal (Centrex or “cloud telephony”). Phones get smaller (from brick phone to pocket phone) while Aimy grows bigger. She went with me to many direct sales events, Daddy and daughter singing “We Are the Champions” to…

  • co-ding

    It’s been an amazing contest. Netflix 1 million dollar prize was awarded to the first team of coders. The second team came in, with equally good stuff, just 20 minutes after the deadline. Data rule. Organized and monetized data, that is. The information age is here to stay. Symbol recognition and manipulation. Pretty soon, we…