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: tech and multi-cultural marketing

  • The on-ramp

    We have “verb-ized” a lot of tech names: xerox, google; in essence, we turn the brand into a verb. Pretty soon, we will “chrome” things i.e. from 0 to 65 miles in 6 seconds, getting to the on-ramp of the web. The need for speed.” You’ve got mail ” now a thing of the past.Talking…

  • computing power

    40 years ago, no housewife could figure out what to do with the Honeywell computers sitting on their kitchen counters. Today, we don’t have enough computing power to satisfy our ever-increasing demand for streaming media and other new apps. Over the past few days, I found out that McNamara brought more computing power to the…

  • Free but not cheap

    People have paid lips service to freedom, the defense of freedom, and the exercise of free speech. But few put any thought on the price of freedom. Freedom somehow is perceived as being free (i.e. you don’t have to pay anything, in economic terms). Actually, freedom costs a lot. Many lives have been laid down…

  • My college dictionary

    I didn’t have to buy it. The office people pooled the money and bought it for me as a birthday gift. See, I was a volunteer interpreter for the Bureau of Child Welfare at Indian Town Gap, Pennsylvania. It’s my first stop in America. While awaiting my own processing (getting my high school diploma and …

  • The plain people

    WSJ had an article on how a bank run affected the Amish community (Indiana). http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124640811360577075.html I guess if anybody emerged unscathed during this long Recession, it would be the Amish people. After all, they have been staying off the grid, much less finding themselves anywhere near Madoff. But truth be told. even these “plain” folks…

  • Pain in the butt

    X-Vice President Cheney signed a book deal to “tell it all” about his bureaucrat career in Washington (and as CEO at Halliburton). I hope he will devote a page or two to the (mis) shooting incident from his “point of view”.  And mostly about his sudden disappearance when the nation needed him most during 9/11.…

  • 40 years

    Moses spent 40 years in the wilderness. Honeywell computer debuted 40 years ago as a kitchen appliance. and Woodstock was happening during summer 1969. That year,  simultaneous demonstrations in  D.C. and S.F. to protest ( Hell no, we won’t go) against the war in Vietnam. Now we start counting down toward the end of this…

  • See me, tweet me

    It’s been 40 years since Woodstock. Many of those half a million attendees are now nearing  retirement, i.e. turning off the engine and letting it slide into the deck. There will be a lot of “see me, tweet me”  (touch deprivation, not to mention social isolation) because as statistics show, many  retired CIA employees died…

  • Asian drivers

    It’s been a long way since Sixteen Candles. In it, we found Long Duk Dong, the male Asian actor, portrayed a Japanese exchange student who wrecked the host family car on a night out “what auto-mobile?” he asked laying on the front lawn at mid morning the next day. Fast forward to today and the…

  • deja vu

    Yesterday I reposted “Invisible Man“.  Today, it’s about “invisible hand“. There is an invisible hand that definitely plays with events in history, and this Adam-Smith-like hand seems to run out of tricks every 40 years or so, so it seems. In Understanding Vietnam (Berkeley Press), we learn that history seems to recycle itself every 40 years…