kimmie nguyen:

Wrapping Up 2011

At current moment, I'm somewhere in Singapore eating yummy hawker street food with my friends, Stef and Ada. Luckily I had the forsight to create this post ahead of time. Something that's been a bit lacking on the blogs this year. Looked around for 2010's wrap-up list but apparently I was too busy vacationing in Mexico at the time :) Last New Year's post was written in 2009, in which I sound way too happy. Must have been the post-accident-i-love-life-high coming through.

This list is by no means an exhaustive summary of the year. Just the moments that are sitting in my head as December winds down.

• For the first time since graduation, I actually have an itch to move to SF again. And give up my ridicuous rent? Right, well it's only an itch...
• There was a lot of stress with the new job. I really should have shutdown and gotten offline more often. Making this current trip much needed and long overdue.
• Naive I am not but on an occasion or two, I may been too trusting. It's a shame that you sometimes can't take people at face value.  But it was such an incident that helped reset the values that I deem important in others.
• Saw my bestie, Ada, move to NY. Never in a millon years would I have expected it. But proud of her for doing it.
• I have a beau. Shhhh, don't tell mom. He's the Aussie and he's awesome. Quite clever too.
• As you know, the holidays and my family don't go hand in hand. But this year, mom bought me a real gift. Diamond earrings. Plus three Buddhism books to save my soul (her words not mine).
• I discovered that I'm allergic to Acai berry seeds. Not the juice, but the seeds. An unfortunate finding after I engulfed half a bag of chocolate covered berries and broke out in hives for a week. 
• Still traveling. Wish there was more time in a year for this but I can't complain about Mexico, Miami, Barcelona, Madrid, Leavenworth (a cute Bavarian town 3 hours outside of Seattle, WA) and Singapore.
• The Reina Sofia museum in Madrid is one of the most beautiful museums that I've ever been to. I'd return just for that and the Jardin Botanico.
• My friend Jas married her best friend, Sancha, after a decade of friendship and all of us wondering if they were ever going to realize what we already knew ;)
• Lots of awesome music festivals to remember with WMC, Coachella and Outside Lands. Always grateful for a chance to be with friends, music and outdoors dancing. Rain or shine.
• Had another amazing year of food parties with the friends. Too many to recount here. Just know, I'm one lucky gal.

Hope you're having a wonderful New Year. See you in 2012.

Swimming with the Big Fish

Next week will mark my one year anniversary at Salesforce. The transition period took longer than expected but I hear that's what happens when going from small to large companies.  I probably turned a corner just shy of three months ago, likely some combination of getting features released plus hitting that milestone with the team. Whatever it was, I finally found the rhythm that'd been missing since I started. I still have a ways to go given depth and scope of SFDC products. But in August, I attended my second Dreamforce with much better success than the first. Meaning I managed to sound somewhat knowledgable and customers didn't laugh when one of the sessions slapped a "You are an Expert" t-shirt on me. These are the small wins I look forward to in my career :)

What I've yet to figure out is what to do with this blog. While I've always stated that I don't care about what I post, I've started to feel more conservative as my identity on the web proliferates. Recently I saw an article about pseudonymity vs real identity, which points to some of the issues I've been having with the social web. Dmitry Shapiro, founder of a new social networking site called AnyBeat, summed it up as, "It’s not that you want to interact with ‘anonymous’ users, you actually want them to have an identity. It just turns out that often it’s better if that identity is not your real one. That way you can be yourself. ...Facebook, Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc... these sites have all become efforts. They’re all work. You’re constant interacting professionally and building up your online profile."

Tru dat. I've noted it before but couldn't quite put a finger on what was actually wrong other than there are just too many places in which I can post content. But the real problem lies in the fact that its become all work for me. At the end of the day I don't care so much about who I'm sharing to, I just don't want that extra cognitive load of figuring how all this content sums up at the end of the day.

Oh, Fair Days of Love

Hello September! Not surprisingly August went up in a poof with the Bay's sun and fog. Bummed I didn't get any real traveling in this summer but girlfriends are talking about heading to Singapore and the Thai Islands in a few months. Can't wait for the hot, hot heat. Hopefully Indian Summer will bring us at least a week of that here in San Francisco. I keep telling the Aussie that it's gonna happen. He thinks I'm just making things up at this point.

So last month was filled with the usual half dozen birthday celebrations, including an epic BBQ in Tomales Bay (of which I was very late to), dancing at Outside Lands music festival, mucho eating and cooking challenges and the arrival of one sweet baby girl, Camille Dugan. Not mine -ew gross- but my friends, Tyee and Steve. The month closed in with champagne toasting for Jas & Sancha's wedding in Sonoma county. And true to style, Jasmin outdid herself with the venue, decor and all of those great details in just under nine months. I of course, wept like a baby to their wedding vows. And no, this has nothing to do with my eggs. Seriously, gross.

Congrats to the happy couple. It only took you twelve years but it's like you've never been apart.

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Photos courtesy of Livia Foo