Each day of life an adventure awaits,
brimming with curiosities to explore,
beholding stories to tell.

Here you’ll find some of Nicole C. Wong’s favorite adventures
at work as a storyteller and in life as an inquisitive soul.

Come join the journey.

What your tweets say about you (or: How to explain Twitter to your grandma)

What do my 3,545 Twitter status updates, photo uploads, location check-ins, article shares, and retweets reveal about who I am?

Last night, I tried to explain Twitter to my 91-year-old grandma. Why? Well, she asked how I won our all-expenses-paid dinner for two at The Clift Hotel — a Social Media Week random act of kindness from Nokia Connect. My grandma is tech-savvy enough to use a computer to play Bejeweled, but she’s abandoned her email account. And she’s heard of Facebook and LinkedIn because their IPOs generate so many headlines, but she wasn’t quite sure what they were or what “social media” was.

So I ditched industry jargon and dreamt up analogies, two useful techniques that I had employed as a technology reporter writing for a wide array of non-techie readers across the United States. I also showed her the conversation of tweets that resulted in the five-course, wine-paired meal that she called “a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

But to truly help her understand my brand personality, presence, and interaction on Twitter, it would have been helpful to show her this data visualization:

Best view of the Golden Gate Bridge at sunset

illumination, originally uploaded by nicolecwong.

You can catch glorious glimpses of the Golden Gate Bridge from any side of it — north or south, east or wast, even above or beneath. I unfailingly favor admiring it from the east, as I jog along the San Francisco marina toward the bridge and the sun setting behind it.

Today at dusk, the headlights and tail-lights that flipped on for Friday rush hour illuminated the bridge’s suspender ropes that reflected in a puddle on the beach. I love how the commute traffic added a magical glow!

Photography tip: Sunset glimmering off San Francisco’s shoreline

The wet sand, revealed for a few seconds at a time as the San Francisco Bay’s waves recede, reflects the golden rainbow sunset.

Play with your camera’s focal point, angle, and elevation (I squatted for this photograph) to capture the sunset dancing on the sand in different hues.

Photography tip: Flowers floating on clouds

I love photographing reflections — especially in pools of water, like puddles or ponds. Reflections always catch my eye and dazzle my mind.

While I was attending my friend’s wedding yesterday at the Allied Arts Guild in Menlo Park, I stooped down to shoot this photo of ruffled flowers floating in a glassy pool lined with glazed Spanish tiles almost a foot beneath the edge of a rough-brick patio. Lots of contrasting textures. As your eyes move down the photo and deeper into the ground, what you’re looking at becomes more ethereal. The flowers float on — then almost melt into — the cotton-candy clouds strewn across the stunning blue sky reflected in the pool.

Inspiring do-it-yourself travel video

“3 guys, 44 days, 11 countries, 18 flights, 38,000 miles, 2 cameras, and almost a terabyte of footage … all to turn 3 ambitious linear concepts based on movement, learning, and food into 3 beautiful and hopefully compelling short films.”

I’ve watched this video four times since its producer posted it a week ago.  This 60-second video flipbook is my favorite of the three short films.  And it’s the only one that doesn’t include narration or even snippets of cameo-role conversations.  The storytelling and the cinematography stand out as vibrantly stunning yet stunningly simple.

A photo journey through my first year living in San Francisco as an adult

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then I’ve composed a story nearly 8 million words long about my first year living in San Francisco as an adult!  No one — not even my parents — would read a diary that long.  But many of my friends and relatives have looked at all 7,900 photos that I’ve shot and uploaded to Flickr chronicling how I’ve been rediscovering my hometown and springboarding from here to daytrips and longer travels over the past 365 days.

Many of my photos feature food.  Why?  I admire creative culinary execution.  I seek inspiration for plating my home cooking.  And sometimes — just sometimes — my appetite proves to be so adventurous that people not only want to know what the concoction I ordered tasted like, but also what it looked like (and maybe how much of that stuff I dared to swallow).  Photographing my memorable meals serves another practical purpose:

What is the best gift to buy from Yahoo!’s store?

I swung by Yahoo!’s company store a few days ago and was flabbergasted to learn someone — yes, one person — had scooped up all 1,000 remaining Insta-Yodel Buttons off the store shelves and out of the stockroom, all at once! Wow. Here I thought I was going to be the big spender by purchasing a dozen of the smile-inducing, sing-songy desktop toys. Now I’ll have to find another fun gift to give until the next shipment arrives…