Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Now Podcasting, Too !

One of the things which I learned in China is that many of the young, educated, professional Chinese view having good English language skills as a prerequisite to many of the top jobs in China. Apparently, the best jobs in China all require regular interaction with foreigners like me. I found they were a lot more interested in me helping them with their English than in helping me learn Chinese.

For some reason, I found that many found my voice, cadence, and diction easier to understand than most. (Maybe they were just trying to be nice to me?) Being from Tennessee in the American South, I mentioned this to an American from South Carolina that I met in Beijing. He laughed and told me that "the Chinese love Southerners because we talk slow." Whatever the reason, I took an interest in teaching English and came up with the idea of using a podcast with corresponding transcript to assist my new friends with pronunciation even when I am not around.
Off topic for this blog... but for anyone who might be interested I even got to teach English in a Chinese government-registered church. See My Chinese Church Away from Home.

I decided to start a podcast equivalent to this blog at http://artsciita.podbean.com/. If English is not your native language, I hope you will check it out. This is something of an experiment so if you try it and like it, you had better let me know. It is a little extra work on me and I might lose interest if nobody seems to be paying attention. Here's an online MP3 player with links to share our subscribe to the RSS feed. I went back and added voice for the most popular posts and a few of my personal favorites.

Copyright © 2007 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved


The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.

Back to the Real World After China

About 6 weeks ago, I completed one of the most challenging 10 months of my entire 26+ year career. I helped create the Enterprise Service Bus for a major Chinese company and during that time I made six trips to China and spent a total of 4.5 months there. I joked with friends that I did not live in the "real world" anymore because I would have never believed that anyone would actually pay me to work in China for so long. I did, however, learn a lot about globally distributed teams, ESB's, SOA, and the culture clash of trying to make people from China, the US, Canada, and India all work together.

In particular, my job was to help integrate their website with 3rd party service providers and their SAP back end. My resume is now full of references to XML, web services, canonical data modeling (XML schemas), WebSphere Message Broker, and WebSphere Process Server.

It was a heady time but I must confess I'm glad its over. It has taken me several weeks to get back into the groove and sit down and take some time to blog again.

Copyright © 2007 by Philip Hartman - All Rights Reserved

The postings on this site are my own and don't necessarily represent IBM's positions, strategies, or opinions.