ES2007S

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Language shock - Inter-cultural confict in the language we use

Most of the time, when we talk about cultural conflicts, we often think more about actions, like how prolonged look at on person is considered rude (as staring) or an showing one's attention to them. However, there cultural differences shows in the language as well, and sometimes cause disturbance to others.

I would like to share my experiences when I first got to Singapore, around two years ago. Back then, I was actually 'shocked' by the language here - Singlish & Chinese in particular. Back in high school, I studied British English as well as American English, but more or less, I were advised to be polite, such as saying "Thanks", "Excuse me" and "Please" whenever I can. However, after arriving in NUS campus (Prince George Park residence, to be specific), and went down the canteen and order the food there, I was deeply troubled. The food that I ordered was no longer available, and the owner show me another dish, saying "Can or not?".

I thought I have done something and made him angry, but in later time, I discovered that 's what they called "Singlish". It was not nice, at least to me... And through my first semester here, I was struggling when working with my Singaporean friends, thinking they have some hostile attitude to me because of the language...

The second bad impression about language issue was during my internship, at one of NUS's robotic lab. Back then, except for my professor and my supervisor, everyone else speak Chinese, during daily conversation and sometimes, even in very technical discussion. It frustrate me for a long time, since I don't know what they are talking about....

In the end, things are settled as I found opportunities to talk with each of my friend / and ask them about why they do so. It turns out those are just habits, and they didn't mean anything. Still, I still suffer a bit from it, being less active when talking with people who use a lot of Singlish / Chinese while speaking.

All in all, I think we need to take others into consideration while speaking, to talk in a way that makes them comfortable, which is more like British English, in my opinion. Of course, we also have to adapt, trying not to think too much in our own view also, since like my case, your friends might not meant anything to you, and you just need to voice out a bit, not hating them :)

There is also an interesting video about a similar experience also, about a guy who comes to the US from Africa

Sunday, February 20, 2011

Managing conflict - Keep a cold head, but a warm heart

As many have pointed out, conflict is really a part of life that you can't avoid. We can have conflict with many people, stranger, colleagues, friend alike. Sometimes, we even have conflict with ourselves... And most of the time, conflicts will cause severe aftermath if not handled properly. What's worse, the consequenes can increase many fold if can't be calm while we are handling it...

Having been in such a situation before, I would like to share my story here. I hope that if you have time to read it, you will take precautions in what you say/do so as not to hurt your friend, like what I did...

Just recently, I was managing the welfare team for Vietnamese community. We have been through a few events together, from organizing the Mid-autumn festival to organizng a vacationm camp for the Vietnamese students, and the Lunar New Year gathering also... Another special activity that we do is a radio show, in which you send wishes or thoughts (anything you can write, basically) to people you care, accompanied with a song. Handling the creation of the studio is me, AAA - my event organizing buddy and four member of the welfare team: BBB, CCC, DDD and EEE.

We have been doing 5 shows so far, all receive a moderate amount of response. And then, the next week is already 14/2 - VDay, so we decided to make a special program for it. Everyone was excited, and we talked a lot about making it as special as the day itself. I even went out photographing a picture and crafted somekind of teaser-picture for the show.

We received around 10 request in total (around the same as our previous shows) and proceed to making the show. While I was writing the script with AAAPhu, the image part is given to DDD and CCC, while EEE and BBB was in charged of the publishing part.

All gone quite well. We finished writing the script, the image took a bit longer and we finshed getting all the material at 8. So I called BBB and asked him to publish the show.

Then we waited, 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour... and then it was already 10:45. Wondering what has happened I called BBB (for the 5th time) to check, and he was still doing it (normally, it only takes 10 minutes to publish the show). As VDay is almost over and the show was still not on, we get lots of question from those who sent us the request, and somehow, that frustrates me and AAA, having us complaining about the attitude of the publishing team. Plus, they have not been active so far, so we get even more irritating...

In the end, the show went on air at 11:20, with us having to jumped in and do something else as well. And we are nowhere happy about that. Thus, I and AAA called the guy and scolded him!

In the next day, he quit! ....

After a few days, we actually calm down, getting back to our sense and started talking to BBB. We found out that at that time, he has just returned from his part-time work, tired because of a lot of work and complains from the boss also. Hence, that slowed his progress a greate deal. After that long lunch, we decided to let the guy go and take care of his work him. In addition, the mental injury that we made him gone through (by what we said) is somewhat healed (not completely), as we came down to a common understanding. But the aftermath is that, we lost a team member and almost destroy our relationship with BBB also, just because we did not understand his situation...

That's story of mine. Though it might not look like a conflict case, but I think this one is qualified as a conflict in interest and ideas, as his need and ours was different at a time, so do our expectation of his performance. And since we was not able to come to a common solution for that, the conflict was not solved effectively, leaving the result like that.

Nevertheless, we walked away with big lesson but paid a big price as well. In short, what I can say is that when these kind of things happen, be it conflicts in your interests, our ideology, or anything else, please take a deep breath first, be calm and analyze the pros and cons of each actions. Moreover, you will need to keep a warm heart to accept others's faults also, as they also have their limts and can't always do what you want them to.

P.S: As I am writing in a rush while traveling back home, the article is not organized very clearly. Please excuse for any errors I made and points them out so I can fix them :)

Monday, February 14, 2011

Application to Blizzard Entertainment as Game Programmer intern

Recruitment Ad (Click to view full size)

Application letter

Tong Huu Khiem

25 Lower Kent Ridge Road, #XXX

Singapore - 119081

February 10^th, 2011

Mr. Ryan Murray,

Human Resources Coordinator,

HR Department,

Blizzard Entertainment, Irvine, California.

Application for internship as Game programmer

Dear Mr. Murray,

My name is Tong Huu Khiem, currently pursuing a degree in Computer Engineering at the National University of Singapore. A week ago, the internship recruitment for game programmer was posted on Blizzard Entertainment website, and it really caught my interest. Thus, I am writing this letter to you, eager to become a part of “Blizzard country” during this summer.

Being a gamer as well as a programmer, I have long been fascinated about becoming one of those who actually creates games that captivate even the most demanding gamers, titles such as Warcraft, Starcraft, Diablo – Blizzard’s trademark. And even though my game development experience has just started last year, with a few simple games, I have been lucky to meet and work with passionate teammates, innovating existing games with new ideas. For example, we created “Resource Wars”, a desktop game developed on the Monopoly board, and a few other games that can be downloaded from the links in my resume.

Besides that, frequent training in NUS has equipped me with sufficient mastery of C++ and OpenGL, extensive exposure with scripting languages such as Python, JavaScript and Ruby as well as Windows application development experience. In addition, I believe my knowledge in producing user interfaces, movies, animations and other types of graphics will become useful when working with Blizzard’s designers.

Given a chance to prove myself, I am confident that my past experiences and skills will create positive contributions while I work as part of Blizzard’s development team, be it improvements on established or under-development titles, such as Dota 2.0 and new version of World of Warcraft. I am looking forward to a challenging yet enjoyable experience in “Blizzard country”, where my skills and passion for gaming are utilized to the fullest.

Attached with this letter is my resume and referral letter. If you would like to schedule an interview, please call me at +65-9156 1848, anytime. And I am certain that you won't be disappointed.

Thank you.

Yours Sincerely,

Tong HUU KHIEM (Mr.) | +65-9156-1848

Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore

Enclosure: Resume, Referral letter

Sunday, January 23, 2011

The key to sucess for engineers - effective communication

While a lone programmer can write good software or a single writer can create the best-selling book, existing problems are not so simple that anyone can solve alone. Hence, we as engineers often work in groups. The process results in an entity with greater ability than all of us combined. But it also creates another problems, as words and ideas get distorted through conversation. That’s why to engineers, including myself, communication is critical.

Being good at communication brings many benefits and the most obvious of them all is the ability to talk and listen well. This has proven extremely useful for me in my team projects, like software development. In that project, we were to build an entirely new software from sketch, and it must be different from any existing one. As a result, each of us had to generate a lot of ideas and convey it to others. Without the ability to listen and understand effective, those special features that makes our product stands out would have been crossed out at the beginning, as they were too “uncommon”. And the ability to understand others and get them to understand you is not the only thing effective communication benefits us. We still need to write documents, proposal… to convince others. That’s where the rest of the effective communication skill set comes into the picture. And we appreciate that we know it.

In short, although saying that I can communicate effective at the moment is not very true, I do appreciate what the skill gave me through my experience. Thus, I am looking forward to improve it through the ES2007S module.

Reference:

Images taken from Fine-tooning: http://www.fine-tooning.com/Effective_Communication_L.jpg

Sunday, January 16, 2011

Setting up ES2007S blogs

Hello,

I 'm Khiem from the same ES2007S class as you guys. This morning we have been divided into 2 blogging group and I opted to help out a bit. Hence, if I would like to received a link from your blogger page so we can work on the e-portfolio component together.

Below is the list of our friends in the blogging group, whose contacts I have collected and their blog's link (if any). If you haven't done so, please send me your contact and blogger link via my email / phone at the end of the post.

Currently, we had: