Journey to 14,411 feet start today

Jes Borland (Blog|Twitter) inspired me with her public commitment with her training for her first half marathon on her blog here.  She posted her plan and how it actually went down every week, good or bad.   I was initially just look at her running posts for some play list idea for my run/walk/hike, I ended up reading her entire series and admire her even more.     I found myself cheering for her even louder, before she even start her race and I realize that this is exactly what I need to do.

So Jes – thank you for inspiring me.  No, no – I’m not going to run any half-marathon or even 5k anytime soon, but I will be joining another 71 climber to trek Mount Rainier National Park and attempt to reach its summit during 2 days journey.   This effort organized by American Lung Association under Climb for Clean Air event, a great fund-raising event to raise awareness for clean air and variety of lung disease that affect so many lives, including mine.

You can find my fund-raising page here.

In the next few months, I will be posting my progress weekly.   My training plan and how the week goes.    I was hoping that I can look back and see my own progress as the time goes and have as many as supporters along the way since this is definitely not just your usual walk in the park.

So there.  The journey start today.   I’ll be posting my progress every Sunday.

Wish me luck.

I’ve moved!

After attending Brent Ozar (Blog|Twitter) Free-Conference session’s at Chicago about branding, blogging and presenting, I decided to change the look of my blog and move my domain to  http://yannirobel.com.   Some of you probably already thought that’s what my blog URL was, but it wasn’t,  It used to be http://sqlscribbles.com which will be up for a while for all the archive that were link to it but no new content will be added there.

I’ve made a commitment to write more, to *gulp* submit abstract this year to present and to give back more to this wonderful community that like an extension to a family to me.  I met wonderful, intelligent people that some of them are become a really good friend for life through this community.

So if you are one of the odd one out there who I am lucky enough to get the feed out of my blog via RSS or actually bookmark the link of my blog, please do change it to my new URL.

Here’s to a new beginning!

Where are they going now?

My husband, John Robel (blog|twitter) posed a very interesting question shortly after the Women in IT (WIT) lunch at SQL Saturday Chicago.    He commented that in the group discussions about the subject, we hear a lot of stories on how we (current Women in Technology) got into the IT field some years ago.    SQL University has a whole week of series about Women in IT that dedicated to just that (Jes, Julie, Audrey, Jen and Wendy – thanks for awesome posts!) and we all know that back then, the choice for women was somewhat limited or we didn’t get a lot of advice or directions, or we weren’t encouraged enough.   Whatever challenges that we had back then, we want to make sure that our children (boy or girl) won’t have them, right?

So the question that he posed to me was if that was the challenge then, what are the challenges now? Where is the next generation going now?  Where are the women going now?  No school counselors are telling them to go to only go to nursing school or be a secretary (right?)  So, what career path are they are choosing today?   Are the enrollments to the Computer Science School’s higher today for women?  It’s a different era today, with all the technology that is available to everybody (well, mostly everybody).

I’m curious to see what’s everybody take on this so please let me know your thoughts!  Where is the generation of women who are in the pipeline for their schooling and careers headed?  If they are no picking technical courses or careers, what are the picking?  You 20-somethings out there (plus or minus a few numbers on either side,) where are you headed?  What is driving your decisions?

My next steps are to take your ideas and thoughts and send them back to the group of High School girls I am mentoring in Indonesia.  The cultural shift I can handle, but I am really interested to know why you all are making the choice your making over here where there isn’t as much restrictions for women…